Welcome to GNUnet What is GNUnet? =============== GNUnet is peer-to-peer framework focusing on security. The first and primary application for GNUnet is anonymous file-sharing. GNUnet is currently developed by a worldwide group of independent free software developers. GNUnet is a GNU package (http://www.gnu.org/). This is an ALPHA release. There are known and significant bugs as well as many missing features in this release. Additional documentation about GNUnet can be found at https://gnunet.org/. Dependencies: ============= Please note that for many of its dependencies GNUnet requires very recent versions of the libraries which are often NOT to be found in stable distributions in 2011. While using older packages may in some cases on some operating systems may seem to work in some limited fashion, we are in many cases aware of serious problems with older packages. Hence please make sure to use the versions listed below. These are the direct dependencies for running GNUnet: - libextractor >= 0.6.1 - libmicrohttpd >= 0.9.2 - libgcrypt >= 1.2 - libcurl >= 7.21.0 - libltdl >= 2.2 (part of GNU libtool) - sqlite >= 3.0 (default database) - mysql >= 5.1 (alternative to sqLite) - postgres >= 8.3 (alternative to sqLite) Recommended autotools for compiling the SVN version are: - autoconf >= 2.59 - automake >= 1.11.1 - libtool >= 2.2 How to install? =============== The fastest way is to use a binary package if it is available for your system. For a more detailed description, read the installation instructions on the webpage at https://gnunet.org/installation. Note that some functions of GNUnet require "root" access. GNUnet will install (tiny) SUID binaries for those functions is you run "make install" as root. If you do not, GNUnet will still work, but some functionality will not be available (including certain forms of NAT traversal). GNUnet requires the GNU MP library (http://www.gnu.org/software/gmp/) and libgcrypt (http://www.gnupg.org/). You can specify the path to libgcrypt by passing "--with-gcrypt=PATH" to configure. You will also need either sqlite (http://www.sqlite.org/), MySQL (http://www.mysql.org/) or PostGres (http://www.postgres.org/). If you install from source, you need to install GNU libextractor first (download from http://www.gnu.org/software/libextractor/). We also recommend installing GNU libmicrohttpd (download from http://www.gnu.org/software/libmicrohttpd/). Then you can start the actual GNUnet compilation process with: $ ./configure --prefix=$HOME --with-extractor=$HOME $ make # make install # sudo -u gnunet mkdir ~/.gnunet/ # sudo -u gnunet touch ~/.gnunet/gnunet.conf # sudo -u gnunet gnunet-arm -s This will compile and install GNUnet to $HOME/bin/, $HOME/lib/ and $HOME/share/ and start the system with the default configuration. It is recommended that you add a user "gnunet" to run "gnunet-arm". You can then still run the end-user applications as another user. If you create a user "gnunet", it is recommended that you edit the configuration file slightly so that data can be stored in "/var/lib/gnunet"; you may also want to use "/etc/gnunet.conf" for the location of the configuration file in this case. Note that additional, per-user configuration files (~/.gnunet/gnunet.conf) need to be created by each user (for example, by running gnunet-setup). Note that gnunet-setup is a separate download and requires recent versions of GTK+ and Glade; you can also edit the configuration file by hand, but this is not recommended. For more general information about the GNU build process read the INSTALL file. If you are compiling the code from subversion, you have to run ". bootstrap" before ./configure. If you receive an error during the running of ". bootstrap" that looks like "macro `AM_PATH_GTK' not found in library", you may need to run aclocal by hand with the -I option, pointing to your aclocal m4 macros, i.e. $ aclocal -I /usr/local/share/aclocal Configuration ============= GNUnet uses two types of configuration files, one that specifies the system-wide defaults (typically located in /usr/share/gnunet/defaults .conf) and a second one that overrides default values with user-specific preferences. The user-specific configuration file should be located in "~/.gnunet/gnunet.conf" or its location can be specified by giving the "-c" option to the respective GNUnet application. The defaults that are shipped with the installation are usually ok, you may want to adjust the limitations (space consumption, bandwidth, etc.) though. The configuration files are human-readable. Note that you MUST create "~/.gnunet/gnunet.conf" explicitly before starting GNUnet. You can either copy "defaults.conf" or simply create an empty file. Usage ===== First, you must obtain an initial list of GNUnet hosts. Knowing a single peer is sufficient since after that GNUnet propagates information about other peers. Note that the default "gnunet.conf" contains URLs from where GNUnet downloads an initial hostlist whenever it is started. If you want to create an alternative URL for others to use, the file can be generated on any machine running GNUnet by periodically executing $ cat $SERVICEHOME/data/hosts/* > the_file and offering 'the_file' via your web server. Alternatively, you can run the build-in web server by adding '-p' to the OPTIONS value in the "hostlist" section of gnunet.conf and opening the respective HTTPPORT to the public. If the solution with the hostlist URL is not feasible for your situation, you can also add hosts manually. Simply copy the hostkeys to "$SERVICEHOME/data/hosts/" (where $SERVICEHOME is the directory specified in the gnunet.conf configuration file). Now start the local node using "gnunet-arm -s". GNUnet should run 24/7 if you want to maximize your anonymity. You should then be able to access GNUnet using the shell: $ gnunet-search KEYWORD This will display a list of results to the console. Then use $ gnunet-download -o FILENAME GNUNET_URI to retrieve a file. The GNUNET_URI is printed by gnunet-search together with a description. To publish files on GNUnet, use the "gnunet-publish" command. The GTK user interface is shipped separately. After downloading and installing gnunet-gtk, you can invoke the GUI with: $ gnunet-gtk For further documentation, see our webpage. Hacking GNUnet ============== Contributions are welcome, please submit bugs to https://gnunet.org/bugs/. Please make sure to run contrib/report.sh and include the output with your bug reports. More about how to report bugs can be found in the GNUnet FAQ on the webpage. Submit patches via E-Mail to gnunet-developers@gnu.org. In order to run the unit tests with "make check", you need to set an environment variable ("GNUNET_PREFIX") to the directory where GNUnet is installed (usually, GNUnet will use OS specific tricks in order to try to figure out the PREFIX, but since the testcase binaries are not installed, that trick does not work for them). Also, before running any testcases, you must complete the installation first. Quick summary: $ ./configure --prefix=$SOMEWHERE $ make $ make install $ export GNUNET_PREFIX=$SOMEWHERE $ make check If any testcases fail to pass on your system, run "contrib/report.sh" and report the output together with information about the failing testcase to the Mantis bugtracking system at https://gnunet.org/bugs/. Running http on port 80 and https on port 443 ============================================= In order to hide GNUnet's HTTP/HTTPS traffic perfectly, you might consider running GNUnet's HTTP/HTTPS transport on port 80/443. However, we do not recommend running GNUnet as root. Instead, forward port 80 to say 8080 with this command (as root, in your startup scripts): # iptables -t nat -A PREROUTING -p tcp -m tcp --dport 80 -j REDIRECT --to-ports 8080 or for HTTPS # iptables -t nat -A PREROUTING -p tcp -m tcp --dport 443 -j REDIRECT --to-ports 4433 Then set in the HTTP section of gnunet.conf the "ADVERTISED-PORT" to "80" and "PORT" to 8080 and similarly in the HTTPS section the "ADVERTISED-PORT" to "443" and "PORT" to 4433. You can do the same trick for the TCP and UDP transports if you want to map them to a priviledged port (from the point of view of the network). However, we are not aware of this providing any advantages at this point. Stay tuned ========== * https://gnunet.org/ * https://gnunet.org/bugs/ * https://gnunet.org/svn/ * http://www.gnu.org/software/gnunet/ * http://mail.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/gnunet-developers * http://mail.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/help-gnunet * http://mail.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/info-gnunet * http://mail.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/gnunet-svn