[Help-gnunet] a few more questions on GNUnet operation

[Ivan Shmakov]

        A bunch of questions I've got after running a few GNUnet nodes,
        for a few days, which, I hope, will be answered here.  TIA.

        • Unless topology/FRIENDS-ONLY is set to YES, what the ‘friends’
          list is used for?  Is it used to specify the preferred peers
          to which the connections are established?

        • gnunet-peerinfo(1) lists some 27 peers on a couple of
          dual-stacke nodes.  Is it normal?

        • What are the meanings of CHK (content hash key?), SKS, KSK,
          Loc (location)?  What's their syntax and semantics?

        • Are, for instance, the “content hash” and “query hash” parts
          of an CHK URI base32hex-encoded SHA-512 values?

        • But what is the meaning of “query hash”?  Is it a hash over
          the metadata?  If so, does such metadata include further
          piece-wise (or block-wise) hashes of the content?  Are such
          pieces fixed-length (nearly 64 KiB?) octet sequences?

        • Is it possible to search for identifiers under a known
          namespace?

        • Where are the implemented --meta= keys are listed?

        • It seems that gnunet-pseudonym(1) blocks SIGINT, SIGTERM, and
          SIGQUIT.  Why?

        • I've published a file on node A a couple of days ago, and it's
          now shown among the gnunet-serach(1) results on node B, but
          not on node C.  What could've gone wrong?

        • There's the transport/DISABLEV6 option to disable the use of
          IPv6.  Is there a complementary DISABLEV4 one?  (One of my
          nodes is IPv4-firewalled against “The World”, so I'd rather
          disable the use of IPv4 on it altogether.)  Is it generally
          possible to set the addresses (or interfaces) the node will
          listen at?

        • A number of binaries (as per the gnunet-server 0.9.3-2 Debian
          package) come set-UID root:

gnunet-helper-dns
gnunet-helper-exit
gnunet-helper-fs-publish
gnunet-helper-nat-client
gnunet-helper-nat-server
gnunet-helper-transport-wlan
gnunet-helper-vpn

          While I understand that such privileges are necessary for
          certain operations (like the creation of TUN/TAP devices),
          this raises security concerns, and also (in the case of
          gnunet-helper-fs-publish) has practical implications for a
          particular use case.  (Not to mention that it's generally
          possible to pre-create a TUN/TAP device and grant access to it
          to a particular user.)  How these set-UID binaries are used,
          and what'd be the consequences of dropping set-UID from them?

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