Sun Aug 11, 2013 12:20 am
Mon Aug 12, 2013 12:10 am
Mon Aug 12, 2013 12:11 am
configure: ********************************************
Please make sure NOW that you have created a user and group 'gnunet'
and additionally a group 'gnunetdns':
addgroup gnunetdns
adduser gnunet
Make sure that '/var/lib/gnunet' is owned (and writable) by user
'gnunet'. Then, you can compile GNUnet with
make
After that, run (if necessary as 'root')
make install
to install everything.
Each GNUnet user should be added to the 'gnunet' group (may
require fresh login to come into effect):
adduser gnunet
(run the above command as root once for each of your users, replacing
"" with the respective login names). If you have a global IP
address, no further configuration is required.
Optionally, download and compile gnunet-gtk to get a GUI for
file-sharing and configuration. This is particularly recommended
if your network setup is non-trivial, as gnunet-setup can be
used to test in the GUI if your network configuration is working.
gnunet-setup should be run as the "gnunet" user under X. As it
does very little with the network, running it as "root" is likely
also harmless. You can also run it as a normal user, but then
you have to copy ~/.gnunet/gnunet.conf" over to the "gnunet" user's
home directory in the end.
Once you have configured your peer, run (as the 'gnunet' user)
gnunet-arm -s
to start the peer. You can then run the various GNUnet-tools as
your "normal" user (who should only be in the group 'gnunet').
********************************************
Mon Aug 12, 2013 2:41 pm
Mon, 08/12/2013 - 09:43 — Christian Grothoff
As there seems to be some larger number of people recently looking at GNUnet, Krista convinced me to elaborate on the current state of the system so that newcommers quickly get an appropriate idea of where we are right now. The short version is this: GNUnet is not yet ready for production use.
Where are we?
We're currently in a phase where we are making some radical changes to the protocol with respect to the previous release. As a result, protocol incompatibilities ensure that the network remains tiny. Some of the changes include moving from RSA to ECC/ECDHE, and most recently changing timer resolution from milliseconds to microseconds (which affects signatures as they include timestamps). In the wake of such high-level breakage, we're also fixing various protocol issues deeper in the bowls of the system.
We are still waiting for ED25519 support in libgcrypt (we're currently using NIST-256, but the goal is to move to ED25519 before the protocol transition is considered finished), the GNU Name System crypto still has some changes that need to be implemented, and the mesh layer protocol implementation also is still incomplete. Once these are done and we're no longer aware of major bugs, we'll release GNUnet 0.10 and hopefully not touch the protocols like this for a long time (some of the stuff we're changing this time was in place since GNUnet 0.0.0, so this is major housecleaning).
After that, we expect that file-sharing and GNS (our DNS replacement) will work nicely. Shortly after that, the plan is to polish the VPN (especially configuration is currently a *****), release GNUnet 1.0 and then the development focus will shift more towards social applications (SecuShare, PSYC, etc.). Features such as improvements to performance, NAT traversal, configuration, documentation and others are happening as well, but they are not tied to the main roadmap and will simply be deployed whenever they are ready.
What can you run today?
Some distributions package GNUnet 0.8. That's so ancient I won't even talk about it. The only versions that might give you any reasonable impression of where we are, are 0.9.5a and SVN HEAD. For SVN HEAD, you will also need to clone libgcrypt from Git, as libgcrypt 1.5.x is not recent enough. In 0.9.5a quite a few things used to work (file-sharing, GADS, on GNU/Linux also VPN/PT); however, the network is very small right now (think a dozen peers, if you're lucky), and some of the hostlists servers are down so you might not find those that are left. Also, 0.9.5a is not protocol compatible with SVN HEAD. Still, you can play around with the GUIs, look at the C APIs, use the command-line tools to see what your peer is doing, or run a network with a few thousand peers on loopback on a normal desktop.
SVN HEAD is likely incompatible with yesterday's version of SVN HEAD, so the network will be even smaller. On the bright side, you get improved crypto, improved APIs, some new features and nicer GUIs. So if you want to see what is around the corner or hack with us, that's what you want to try. But again, this is not ready for your mom just yet.
How can you help?
A good starting point is our bugtracker. You can also help by making sure that when you ask questions (for example, on IRC), the answers are documented. So if you read our documentation and have trouble understanding it, please feel free to ask us, but then help us by providing patches to the documentation so that others won't need to ask the same questions again. You're also welcome to help with translating the documentation to other languages; if you have done some translations, please contact us directly so we can host them on gnunet.org. We are aware that documentation --- especially for normal users --- is so far very sparse and needs to be improved. So help in this area is particularly welcome.
Tue Aug 13, 2013 12:25 am
Sat Aug 17, 2013 12:32 am