Whether IPNI indexer-provider supports NAT Hole punching?

[wenyue]

I noticed that there are such description in the documentation:

index-provider must be publicly reachable. IPNI will try to establish connection into it to fetch Advertisement chains. If that can't be done CIDs will not appear in IPNI. Ensure that your firewall is configured to allow incoming connections on the ProviderServer port specified in the index-provider configuration. Ensure that the index-provider is configured to advertise routable addresses in its announcements (where indexers get advertisements) and in its advertisements (where retrieval clients get content).

Does this mean the provider must have a public IP? What if I use libp2p pubsub instead of HTTP?

[willscott]

Yes. the provider does need a public IP.
It is meant for larger, stable providers - if you do not have a public / stable IP, the DHT is likely a better choice.

IPNI reduces the overhead of re-publishing content daily to show "your still there" with the expectation that indexers can poll the provider at a regular interval to confirm it's still there.

[wenyue]

ok, thanks for your reply.