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 part of the GNU project (http://www.gnu.org/). This is a BETA release. While there are no known significant bugs, we are still changing significant aspects of the system in any other version. While we believe that the system is usable, quite a few important features -- which would improve performance make the life of users easier -- are still missing. Also, the documentation may not be adequate for inexperienced users. For a longer description of the GNUnet System see our webpages http://www.gnu.org/software/gnunet/ and http://gnunet.org/. Dependencies: ============= For the impatient, here is the list of immediate dependencies for running GNUnet: - libextractor >= 0.5.23 - libmicrohttpd >= 0.4.2 - libgcrypt >= 1.2 - libgmp >= 4.0 - libcurl >= 7.15.4 - libltdl >= 2.2 (part of GNU libtool) - mysql >= 5.0 (strongly recommended) - sqlite >= 3.0 (alternative to MySQL) Certain gnunet-setup plugins would also like to have: - GTK >= 2.6.0 - Qt >= 4.0 Recommended autotools for compiling the SVN version are: - autoconf >= 2.59 - automake >= 1.9.4 - libtool >= 2.2 (only in Debian experimental) See also README.debian for a list of Debian packages. 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 http://gnunet.org/documentation.php3. If you install from source, you need to install libextractor first (download from http://gnunet.org/libextractor/). Then you can start the actual GNUnet compilation process with: $ ./configure --prefix=$HOME --with-extractor=$HOME $ make # make install # gnunet-setup # (note: does not yet exist!) # gnunet-arm -s This will compile and install GNUnet to ~/bin/, ~/lib/ and ~/man/. gnunet-setup will create the configuration; this step is interactive. You can run gnunet-setup as root for a system-wide installation or as a particular user to create a personal installation. If you do not want to run gnunetd as root, gnunet-setup can be used to add a user "gnunet". Data will then be stored in /var/lib/gnunet and gnunetd will run as that user. Note that additional, per-user configuration files (~/.gnunet/gnunet.conf) also need to be created by each user by running gnunet-setup without the -d option. Depending on your operating system the wizards of gnunet-setup can also be used to create an init script that starts gnunetd each time the system boots. For more general information about the GNU build process read the INSTALL file. GNUnet requires the GNU MP library (http://www.gnu.org/software/gmp/) and libgcrypt. You can specify the path to libgcrypt by passing "--with-gcrypt=PATH" to configure. You will also need either sqlite (version 3 or higher) or MySQL (version 5.0 or higher). 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 ============= // FIXME: update this section once we have gnunet-setup! GNUnet uses two types of configuration files, one for the daemon (called gnunetd.conf) and one for each user (gnunet.conf). You can create and edit these configuration files with the gnunet-setup tool. You need to add the option "-d" to gnunet-setup in order to edit gnunetd.conf (by default, gnunet-setup will edit gnunet.conf). The defaults that are created the first time you run gnunet-setup are usually ok, you may want to adjust the limitations (space consumption, bandwidth, etc.) though. The configuration files are human-readable; gnunetd's configuration is typically located at "/etc/gnunetd.conf". The per-user configuration file should be at "~/.gnunet/gnunet.conf". A default version of the per-user configuration will automatically be created whenever you run any tool that needs that particular cofniguration file. You MUST create /etc/gnunet.conf explicitly before starting gnunetd, and the recommended way to do this is to run gnunet-setup -d (plus possibly options to specify which user interface you would perfer). If you want to use a different configuration file, pass the name of the configuration file as an argument with the option "-c" to any GNUnet application. Sending a SIGHUP to the gnunetd process will cause gnunetd to re-read the configuration file. Note that not all options can be changed at runtime this way (e.g. to change any port number, you must fully restart gnunetd). 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 $GNUNETD_HOME/data/hosts/* > the_file If the solution with the URL is not feasible for your situation, you can also add hosts manually. The GNUnet webpage has a public directory of hostkeys under http://gnunet.org/hosts/. You can of course use any other source for these files. Copy the hostkeys to "$GNUNETD_HOME/data/hosts/" (where $GNUNETD_HOME is the directory specified in the /etc/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 may start it as a service with "/etc/init.d/gnunet start". To publish files on GNUnet, use the "gnunet-publish" command. The GTK user interface is shipped separately from GNUnet. After downloading and installing gnunet-gtk, you can invoke the GUI with: $ gnunet-gtk For Qt/KDE users, there is also a QT user interface (also shipped separately). If you install gnunet-qt, you can invoke the GUI with: $ gnunet-qt If you want to use the shell (part of this distribution), use $ 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. In order to share files, the easiest way is to create a directory with the files (and directories) that you want to share and run $ nohup gnunet-auto-share NAME-OF-THE-DIRECTORY & For further documentation, see our webpage. Hacking GNUnet ============== Contributions are welcome, please submit bugs to https://gnunet.org/mantis/. 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/mantis/. Running http on port 80 ======================= In order to hide GNUnet's HTTP traffic perfectly, you might consider running GNUnet's HTTP transport on port 80. However, you should not run 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 Then set in the HTTP section of gnunetd.conf the "ADVERTISED-PORT" to "80" and "PORT" to 8080. 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). Running the SMTP transport ========================== // NOTE: SMTP is not currently available in this version of GNUnet Running GNUnet over SMTP (e-mail) is a bit more involved. Note that you do not need to run all transports (only running the NAT transport is the only thing that will not work). If you really want to do P2P over SMTP, read the instructions at http://gnunet.org/smtp.php3 Stay tuned ========== * http://www.gnu.org/software/gnunet/ * http://gnunet.org/ * https://gnunet.org/mantis/ * https://gnunet.org/drupal/ * 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