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

[Fungi4All]

From: address@hidden

Hi!

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

No rush, I assumed it was a users list and others who are experienced may try to give a hint or two.

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

I must have missed it and looking through the manual I couldn't find anything relevant.

I did scan some config files to find this but I must have missed it or was looking at the wrong config file.  I wonder how much of a difference this old stable debian version has in its topology.

will tell you what path is currently configured. gnunet-setup basically

reads your configuration file to find out where to put the file.

Yes, that is what I was looking for.

> 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.

Understandable :), it is one of those things with linux that you learn to continue on even if some errors exists hoping that configuring things afterwards will ommit the errors.  So I did not keep good notes of them thinking it must have to do with the variation between instructions and current/outdated package.  Eventually I removed it all in one maching that I was not able to find any peers, kept it in another that was succeeding in showing a list of possible connections.

> 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.

Makes sense.

> 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.

It sounds like a special nightmare thinking about it, but I only meant if being installed not necessaraly running whether there are cross dependencies that alter each other's configurations.  I assume if gnunet is based on true stable IPs having IPs being replaced uncontrollably will result in an absolute mesh.  It is an interesting idea though if it was based on an onion dns and all had onion addresses.  Maybe I am clueless to how impossible this may be :)

> 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).

Ok, you have sold me in scraping the system installs and start from git-scratch.

> Sincerely, all help will be greatly appreciated.

> Have a good day (or night)

Hope it helps!

Best,

Christian

Yes, thank you.  I will take a new swing at it and report back if I face a wall again.

It is night everywhere, the task is to seek the light!   - from the dark ages we live in.