Re: [GNUnet-developers] GNUnet in Whonix

[bancfc]

On 2016-12-18 17:38, Christian Grothoff wrote:
> On 12/18/2016 05:11 PM, address@hidden wrote:
> > Hi. I am a Whonix [0] developer.
> >
> > We are looking for a decentralized and censorship-resistant storage
> > network to communicate notifications about critical situations [1] to
> > our users and host the project metadata and files themselves to resist 
> > a
> > Permanent Takedown Attack.[2]
> >
> > GNUnet seems a perfect match for our purposes. I have some questions:
> >
> > * Is the GNUnet version in Debian stable (currently: jessie) current
> > enough to connect with the GNUnet live network or is it usually 
> > obsolete
> > because of Debian's stable freeze policy? If its the latter could you
> > please consider running your own standalone repo?
>
> Way too old, but we have a few serious bugs in the source repo we need
> to fix before we can make a reasonably stable release.

Thanks for your reply Christian. Understood. We'll keep an eye out for 
any announcements.

Also I misspoke, by repo I meant an deb package repo (preferrably 
running an Onion mirror too in case of updater bugs like the one we 
saw). This would make it easier for building our images and our users 
wouldn't have to trust our machines with compiled binaries until 
repoducible builds happen eventually.


> > * We have approx. 15K users - are you okay with us adding such a 
> > number
> > of users to your current network?
>
> In principle yes, but until we fix certain bugs and make the next
> release, i would advise against it, as you are likely to just get
> complaints due to the bugs.
>
> > * Since we are Tor based (and we need our notifications to reach users
> > who live behind firewalls) we will be tunneling our GNUnet
> > communications over Tor. I haven't been able to connect GNUnet over 
> > Tor
> > in Whonix yet (user -> Tor -> GNUnet). Did anyone manage to run GNUnet
> > over Tor using the TCP based transports?
>
> IIRC Lynx has done this, but probably using the HTTP-based transports
> with the HTTP-proxy option.  Regardless, to do so one will also have to
> configure at least some peers to run as Tor hidden services. Doable,
> helps big time with NAT traversal (one of the bigger open issues), but
> non-trivial setup.

A side-effect of connecting over Tor is NAT traversal though I 
understand that otherwise it can be  problem. I'll see if the 
torsevers.net guys are willing to help host some GNUnet nodes come 
prime-time.

> > * What tools can be used to customize GNUnet node settings via 
> > scripting
> > in Bash/Python?
>
> You want to invoke gnunet-config to edit the configuration file. I'm
> right now working on gnunet-nat, to automatically produce a reasonable
> configuration for NATed systems ("gnunet-nat -aw" will be the command 
> to
> run once it works nicely, you can run "gnunet-nat -a" to just display
> the suggested changes to the config).

Sounds good.

> We'll be at #33c3, happy to meet Whonix'ers there again.

Great, I know that at least someone from our project is going :)

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