Re: [Help-gnunet] I am about to give up trying - help

[Christian Grothoff]

Hi!

Sorry for the huge delay, but I'm insanely busy.  Some answers below...

On 04/25/2017 12:09 PM, Fungilife wrote:
> Good to find you,
> Exciting project you have going which I never realized or new as much about.
> I am on debian testing on amd-64 and downloaded the packages relating to
> gnunet and I have spent days trying to configure it together with a
> "friend" "neighbor" who is trying to do the same.  Basically after
> following all the steps in the installation neither one was able to
> really realize a connection to anything.
> 1st question is where does the file FRIENDS go and where does the
> gnunet-setup find it?

$ gnunet-config -s topology -f -o friends

will tell you what path is currently configured.  gnunet-setup basically
reads your configuration file to find out where to put the file.

> 2nd question, is that some steps on the installation procedure resulted
> in "already exists" which is understandable for the difference of
> compiling from source or doing a sys-install.  But the last couple of
> steps resulted in errors.  

Can't help here without specific information about the errors.

> Nevertheless in checking the gui "for
> friends" a whole bunch of connections seemed active, 1 showing a local
> address (127.0.0.1) although neither of us related to it.

Depending on the configuration of a peer, peers can claim to have
127.0.0.1 as an address. Well-configured (public) peers don't do this,
but the option is something we must have so that we can for example run
100 peers on one host for experiments/testcases.  But, this is pretty
harmless, your peer will quickly learn that 127.0.0.1:PORT doesn't work
and move on to another address.

> 3rd  Do resolvconf, avahi, samba, tor, openvpn related to problems we
> may be experiencing or is it something relating to system problems?  

GNUnet should work regardless of you using other services.  Naturally,
forcing _all_ of your traffic through Tor or a VPN via some system
configuration may make it harder for other peers to connect to you
(especially as GNUnet may not correctly determine it's public IP address
in that situation), so in this case you may have some special fun
teaching GNUnet your network configuration.

> Is
> the debian version of gnunet outdated in a way that it may cause
> problems and maybe the instructions do not match the current package?

Yes. Very much so.  We highly recommend anyone to use Git Head at his
point, even though it still has some issues, it has way fewer than
0.10.1, see also https://gnunet.org/bugs/ (including"roadmap"/changelog).

> Sincerely, all help will be greatly appreciated.
> Have a good day (or night)

Hope it helps!

Best,

Christian

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