Re: [GNUnet-developers] GNUnet in Whonix

[Christian Grothoff]

On 12/18/2016 05:11 PM, address@hidden wrote:
> Hi. I am a Whonix [0] developer.
> 
> We are looking for a decentralized and censorship-resistant storage
> network to communicate notifications about critical situations [1] to
> our users and host the project metadata and files themselves to resist a
> Permanent Takedown Attack.[2]
> 
> GNUnet seems a perfect match for our purposes. I have some questions:
> 
> * Is the GNUnet version in Debian stable (currently: jessie) current
> enough to connect with the GNUnet live network or is it usually obsolete
> because of Debian's stable freeze policy? If its the latter could you
> please consider running your own standalone repo?

Way too old, but we have a few serious bugs in the source repo we need
to fix before we can make a reasonably stable release.

> * We have approx. 15K users - are you okay with us adding such a number
> of users to your current network?

In principle yes, but until we fix certain bugs and make the next
release, i would advise against it, as you are likely to just get
complaints due to the bugs.

> * Since we are Tor based (and we need our notifications to reach users
> who live behind firewalls) we will be tunneling our GNUnet
> communications over Tor. I haven't been able to connect GNUnet over Tor
> in Whonix yet (user -> Tor -> GNUnet). Did anyone manage to run GNUnet
> over Tor using the TCP based transports?

IIRC Lynx has done this, but probably using the HTTP-based transports
with the HTTP-proxy option.  Regardless, to do so one will also have to
configure at least some peers to run as Tor hidden services. Doable,
helps big time with NAT traversal (one of the bigger open issues), but
non-trivial setup.

> * What tools can be used to customize GNUnet node settings via scripting
> in Bash/Python?

You want to invoke gnunet-config to edit the configuration file. I'm
right now working on gnunet-nat, to automatically produce a reasonable
configuration for NATed systems ("gnunet-nat -aw" will be the command to
run once it works nicely, you can run "gnunet-nat -a" to just display
the suggested changes to the config).

We'll be at #33c3, happy to meet Whonix'ers there again.

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