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14 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/">Petter Reinholdtsen
</a>
21 <h3>Entries tagged "freedombox".
</h3>
25 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Freedombox_on_Dreamplug__Raspberry_Pi_and_virtual_x86_machine.html">Freedombox on Dreamplug, Raspberry Pi and virtual x86 machine
</a>
31 <p>The
<a href=
"https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox">Freedombox
32 project
</a> is working on to providing the software and hardware for
33 making it easy for non-technical people to host their data and
34 communication at home, and being able to communicate with their
35 friends and family encrypted and away from prying eyes. It has been
36 going on for a while, and is slowly progressing towards a new test
37 release (
0.2). And what day could be better than the Pi day to
38 announce that the new version will provide "hard drive"/SD card/USB
39 stick images for Dreamplug, Raspberry Pi and VirtualBox (or any other
40 virtualization system), and can also be installed using a Debian
41 installer preseed file. The Debian based Freedombox is now based on
42 Debian Jessie, where most of the needed packages used are already
43 present. Only one, the freedombox-setup package, is missing. To try
44 to build your own boot image to test the current status, fetch the
45 freedom-maker scripts and build using
46 <a href=
"http://packages.qa.debian.org/vmdebootstrap">vmdebootstrap
</a>
47 with a user with sudo access to become root:
50 git clone http://anonscm.debian.org/git/freedombox/freedom-maker.git \
52 sudo apt-get install git vmdebootstrap mercurial python-docutils \
53 mktorrent extlinux virtualbox qemu-user-static binfmt-support \
55 make -C freedom-maker dreamplug-image raspberry-image virtualbox-image
58 <p>Root access is needed to run debootstrap and mount loopback
59 devices. See the README for more details on the build. If you do not
60 want all three images, trim the make line. But note that thanks to
<a
61 href=
"https://bugs.debian.org/741407">a race condition in
62 vmdebootstrap
</a>, the build might fail without the patch to the
65 <p>If you instead want to install using a Debian CD and the preseed
66 method, boot a Debian Wheezy ISO and use this boot argument to load
67 the preseed values:
</p>
70 url=
<a href=
"http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox/preseed-jessie.dat">http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox/preseed-jessie.dat
</a>
73 <p>But note that due to
<a href=
"https://bugs.debian.org/740673">a
74 recently introduced bug in apt in Jessie
</a>, the installer will
75 currently hang while setting up APT sources. Killing the
76 '
<tt>apt-cdrom ident
</tt>' process when it hang a few times during the
77 installation will get the installation going. This affect all
78 installations in Jessie, and I expect it will be fixed soon.
</p>
80 Give it a go and let us know how it goes on the mailing list, and help
81 us get the new release published. :) Please join us on
82 <a href=
"irc://irc.debian.org:6667/%23freedombox">IRC (#freedombox on
83 irc.debian.org)
</a> and
84 <a href=
"http://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/freedombox-discuss">the
85 mailing list
</a> if you want to help make this vision come true.
</p>
91 Tags:
<a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian
</a>,
<a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english
</a>,
<a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/freedombox">freedombox
</a>,
<a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet
</a>,
<a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/surveillance">surveillance
</a>,
<a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/web">web
</a>.
96 <div class=
"padding"></div>
100 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Teaching_vmdebootstrap_to_create_Raspberry_Pi_SD_card_images.html">Teaching vmdebootstrap to create Raspberry Pi SD card images
</a>
107 <a href=
"http://packages.qa.debian.org/v/vmdebootstrap.html">vmdebootstrap
</a>
108 program is a a very nice system to create virtual machine images. It
109 create a image file, add a partition table, mount it and run
110 debootstrap in the mounted directory to create a Debian system on a
111 stick. Yesterday, I decided to try to teach it how to make images for
112 <a href=
"https://wiki.debian.org/RaspberryPi">Raspberry Pi
</a>, as part
113 of a plan to simplify the build system for
114 <a href=
"https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox">the FreedomBox
115 project
</a>. The FreedomBox project already uses vmdebootstrap for
116 the virtualbox images, but its current build system made multistrap
117 based system for Dreamplug images, and it is lacking support for
120 <p>Armed with the knowledge on how to build "foreign" (aka non-native
121 architecture) chroots for Raspberry Pi, I dived into the vmdebootstrap
122 code and adjusted it to be able to build armel images on my amd64
123 Debian laptop. I ended up giving vmdebootstrap five new options,
124 allowing me to replicate the image creation process I use to make
125 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_Raspberry_Pi_based_batman_adv_Mesh_network_node.html">Debian
126 Jessie based mesh node images for the Raspberry Pi
</a>. First, the
127 <tt>--foreign /path/to/binfm_handler
</tt> option tell vmdebootstrap to
128 call debootstrap with --foreign and to copy the handler into the
129 generated chroot before running the second stage. This allow
130 vmdebootstrap to create armel images on an amd64 host. Next I added
131 two new options
<tt>--bootsize size
</tt> and
<tt>--boottype
132 fstype
</tt> to teach it to create a separate /boot/ partition with the
133 given file system type, allowing me to create an image with a vfat
134 partition for the /boot/ stuff. I also added a
<tt>--variant
135 variant
</tt> option to allow me to create smaller images without the
136 Debian base system packages installed. Finally, I added an option
137 <tt>--no-extlinux
</tt> to tell vmdebootstrap to not install extlinux
138 as a boot loader. It is not needed on the Raspberry Pi and probably
139 most other non-x86 architectures. The changes were accepted by the
140 upstream author of vmdebootstrap yesterday and today, and is now
142 <a href=
"http://git.liw.fi/cgi-bin/cgit/cgit.cgi/vmdebootstrap/">the
143 upstream project page
</a>.
</p>
145 <p>To use it to build a Raspberry Pi image using Debian Jessie, first
146 create a small script (the customize script) to add the non-free
147 binary blob needed to boot the Raspberry Pi and the APT source
152 set -e # Exit on first error
155 cat
<<EOF
> etc/apt/sources.list
156 deb http://http.debian.net/debian/ jessie main contrib non-free
158 # Install non-free binary blob needed to boot Raspberry Pi. This
159 # install a kernel somewhere too.
160 wget https://raw.github.com/Hexxeh/rpi-update/master/rpi-update \
161 -O $rootdir/usr/bin/rpi-update
162 chmod a+x $rootdir/usr/bin/rpi-update
163 mkdir -p $rootdir/lib/modules
164 touch $rootdir/boot/start.elf
165 chroot $rootdir rpi-update
168 <p>Next, fetch the latest vmdebootstrap script and call it like this
169 to build the image:
</p>
172 sudo ./vmdebootstrap \
175 --distribution jessie \
176 --mirror http://http.debian.net/debian \
185 --root-password raspberry \
186 --hostname raspberrypi \
187 --foreign /usr/bin/qemu-arm-static \
188 --customize `pwd`/customize \
192 --package ca-certificates \
197 <p>The list of packages being installed are the ones needed by
198 rpi-update to make the image bootable on the Raspberry Pi, with the
199 exception of netbase, which is needed by debootstrap to find
200 /etc/hosts with the minbase variant. I really wish there was a way to
201 set up an Raspberry Pi using only packages in the Debian archive, but
202 that is not possible as far as I know, because it boots from the GPU
203 using a non-free binary blob.
</p>
205 <p>The build host need debootstrap, kpartx and qemu-user-static and
206 probably a few others installed. I have not checked the complete
207 build dependency list.
</p>
209 <p>The resulting image will not use the hardware floating point unit
210 on the Raspberry PI, because the armel architecture in Debian is not
211 optimized for that use. So the images created will be a bit slower
212 than
<a href=
"http://www.raspbian.org/">Raspbian
</a> based images.
</p>
218 Tags:
<a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian
</a>,
<a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english
</a>,
<a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/freedombox">freedombox
</a>,
<a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/mesh network">mesh network
</a>.
223 <div class=
"padding"></div>
227 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_Raspberry_Pi_based_batman_adv_Mesh_network_node.html">A Raspberry Pi based batman-adv Mesh network node
</a>
233 <p>The last few days I have been experimenting with
234 <a href=
"http://www.open-mesh.org/projects/batman-adv/wiki">the
235 batman-adv mesh technology
</a>. I want to gain some experience to see
236 if it will fit
<a href=
"https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox">the
237 Freedombox project
</a>, and together with my neighbors try to build a
238 mesh network around the park where I live. Batman-adv is a layer
2
239 mesh system ("ethernet" in other words), where the mesh network appear
240 as if all the mesh clients are connected to the same switch.
</p>
242 <p>My hardware of choice was the Linksys WRT54GL routers I had lying
243 around, but I've been unable to get them working with batman-adv. So
244 instead, I started playing with a
245 <a href=
"http://www.raspberrypi.org/">Raspberry Pi
</a>, and tried to
246 get it working as a mesh node. My idea is to use it to create a mesh
247 node which function as a switch port, where everything connected to
248 the Raspberry Pi ethernet plug is connected (bridged) to the mesh
249 network. This allow me to hook a wifi base station like the Linksys
250 WRT54GL to the mesh by plugging it into a Raspberry Pi, and allow
251 non-mesh clients to hook up to the mesh. This in turn is useful for
252 Android phones using
<a href=
"http://servalproject.org/">the Serval
253 Project
</a> voip client, allowing every one around the playground to
254 phone and message each other for free. The reason is that Android
255 phones do not see ad-hoc wifi networks (they are filtered away from
256 the GUI view), and can not join the mesh without being rooted. But if
257 they are connected using a normal wifi base station, they can talk to
258 every client on the local network.
</p>
260 <p>To get this working, I've created a debian package
261 <a href=
"https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/meshfx-node">meshfx-node
</a>
263 <a href=
"https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/meshfx-node/blob/master/build-rpi-mesh-node">build-rpi-mesh-node
</a>
264 to create the Raspberry Pi boot image. I'm using Debian Jessie (and
265 not Raspbian), to get more control over the packages available.
266 Unfortunately a huge binary blob need to be inserted into the boot
267 image to get it booting, but I'll ignore that for now. Also, as
268 Debian lack support for the CPU features available in the Raspberry
269 Pi, the system do not use the hardware floating point unit. I hope
270 the routing performance isn't affected by the lack of hardware FPU
273 <p>To create an image, run the following with a sudo enabled user
274 after inserting the target SD card into the build machine:
</p>
277 % wget -O build-rpi-mesh-node \
278 https://raw.github.com/petterreinholdtsen/meshfx-node/master/build-rpi-mesh-node
279 % sudo bash -x ./build-rpi-mesh-node
> build.log
2>&
1
280 % dd if=/root/rpi/rpi_basic_jessie_$(date +%Y%m%d).img of=/dev/mmcblk0 bs=
1M
284 <p>Booting with the resulting SD card on a Raspberry PI with a USB
285 wifi card inserted should give you a mesh node. At least it does for
286 me with a the wifi card I am using. The default mesh settings are the
287 ones used by the Oslo mesh project at Hackeriet, as I mentioned in
288 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Oslo_community_mesh_network___with_NUUG_and_Hackeriet_at_Hausmania.html">an
289 earlier blog post about this mesh testing
</a>.
</p>
291 <p>The mesh node was not horribly expensive either. I bought
292 everything over the counter in shops nearby. If I had ordered online
293 from the lowest bidder, the price should be significantly lower:
</p>
297 <tr><th>Supplier
</th><th>Model
</th><th>NOK
</th></tr>
298 <tr><td>Teknikkmagasinet
</td><td>Raspberry Pi model B
</td><td>349.90</td></tr>
299 <tr><td>Teknikkmagasinet
</td><td>Raspberry Pi type B case
</td><td>99.90</td></tr>
300 <tr><td>Lefdal
</td><td>Jensen Air:Link
25150</td><td>295.-
</td></tr>
301 <tr><td>Clas Ohlson
</td><td>Kingston
16 GB SD card
</td><td>199.-
</td></tr>
302 <tr><td>Total cost
</td><td></td><td>943.80</td></tr>
306 <p>Now my mesh network at home consist of one laptop in the basement
307 connected to my production network, one Raspberry Pi node on the
1th
308 floor that can be seen by my neighbor across the park, and one
309 play-node I use to develop the image building script. And some times
310 I hook up my work horse laptop to the mesh to test it. I look forward
311 to figuring out what kind of latency the batman-adv setup will give,
312 and how much packet loss we will experience around the park. :)
</p>
318 Tags:
<a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english
</a>,
<a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/freedombox">freedombox
</a>,
<a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/mesh network">mesh network
</a>,
<a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug
</a>.
323 <div class=
"padding"></div>
327 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Oslo_community_mesh_network___with_NUUG_and_Hackeriet_at_Hausmania.html">Oslo community mesh network - with NUUG and Hackeriet at Hausmania
</a>
333 <p>Wireless mesh networks are self organising and self healing
334 networks that can be used to connect computers across small and large
335 areas, depending on the radio technology used. Normal wifi equipment
336 can be used to create home made radio networks, and there are several
337 successful examples like
338 <a href=
"http://www.freifunk.net/">Freifunk
</a> and
339 <a href=
"http://www.awmn.net/">Athens Wireless Metropolitan Network
</a>
341 <a href=
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wireless_community_networks_by_region#Greece">wikipedia
342 for a large list
</a>) around the globe. To give you an idea how it
343 work, check out the nice overview of the Kiel Freifunk community which
344 can be seen from their
345 <a href=
"http://freifunk.in-kiel.de/ffmap/nodes.html">dynamically
346 updated node graph and map
</a>, where one can see how the mesh nodes
347 automatically handle routing and recover from nodes disappearing.
348 There is also a small community mesh network group in Oslo, Norway,
349 and that is the main topic of this blog post.
</p>
351 <p>I've wanted to check out mesh networks for a while now, and hoped
352 to do it as part of my involvement with the
<a
353 href=
"http://www.nuug.no/">NUUG member organisation
</a> community, and
354 my recent involvement in
355 <a href=
"https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox">the Freedombox project
</a>
356 finally lead me to give mesh networks some priority, as I suspect a
357 Freedombox should use mesh networks to connect neighbours and family
358 when possible, given that most communication between people are
359 between those nearby (as shown for example by research on Facebook
360 communication patterns). It also allow people to communicate without
361 any central hub to tap into for those that want to listen in on the
362 private communication of citizens, which have become more and more
363 important over the years.
</p>
365 <p>So far I have only been able to find one group of people in Oslo
366 working on community mesh networks, over at the hack space
367 <a href=
"http://hackeriet.no/">Hackeriet
</a> at Husmania. They seem to
368 have started with some Freifunk based effort using OLSR, called
369 <a href=
"http://oslo.freifunk.net/index.php?title=Main_Page">the Oslo
370 Freifunk project
</a>, but that effort is now dead and the people
371 behind it have moved on to a batman-adv based system called
372 <a href=
"http://meshfx.org/trac">meshfx
</a>. Unfortunately the wiki
373 site for the Oslo Freifunk project is no longer possible to update to
374 reflect this fact, so the old project page can't be updated to point to
375 the new project. A while back, the people at Hackeriet invited people
376 from the Freifunk community to Oslo to talk about mesh networks. I
377 came across this video where Hans Jørgen Lysglimt interview the
378 speakers about this talk (from
379 <a href=
"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N2Kd7CLkhSY">youtube
</a>):
</p>
381 <p><iframe width=
"420" height=
"315" src=
"https://www.youtube.com/embed/N2Kd7CLkhSY" frameborder=
"0" allowfullscreen
></iframe></p>
383 <p>I mentioned OLSR and batman-adv, which are mesh routing protocols.
384 There are heaps of different protocols, and I am still struggling to
385 figure out which one would be "best" for some definitions of best, but
386 given that the community mesh group in Oslo is so small, I believe it
387 is best to hook up with the existing one instead of trying to create a
388 completely different setup, and thus I have decided to focus on
389 batman-adv for now. It sure help me to know that the very cool
390 <a href=
"http://www.servalproject.org/">Serval project in Australia
</a>
391 is using batman-adv as their meshing technology when it create a self
392 organizing and self healing telephony system for disaster areas and
393 less industrialized communities. Check out this cool video presenting
395 <a href=
"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=30qNfzJCQOA">youtube
</a>):
</p>
397 <p><iframe width=
"560" height=
"315" src=
"https://www.youtube.com/embed/30qNfzJCQOA" frameborder=
"0" allowfullscreen
></iframe></p>
399 <p>According to the wikipedia page on
400 <a href=
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_mesh_network">Wireless
401 mesh network
</a> there are around
70 competing schemes for routing
402 packets across mesh networks, and OLSR, B.A.T.M.A.N. and
403 B.A.T.M.A.N. advanced are protocols used by several free software
404 based community mesh networks.
</p>
406 <p>The batman-adv protocol is a bit special, as it provide layer
2
407 (as in ethernet ) routing, allowing ipv4 and ipv6 to work on the same
408 network. One way to think about it is that it provide a mesh based
409 vlan you can bridge to or handle like any other vlan connected to your
410 computer. The required drivers are already in the Linux kernel at
411 least since Debian Wheezy, and it is fairly easy to set up. A
412 <a href=
"http://www.open-mesh.org/projects/batman-adv/wiki/Quick-start-guide">good
413 introduction
</a> is available from the Open Mesh project. These are
414 the key settings needed to join the Oslo meshfx network:
</p>
417 <tr><th>Setting
</th><th>Value
</th></tr>
418 <tr><td>Protocol / kernel module
</td><td>batman-adv
</td></tr>
419 <tr><td>ESSID
</td><td>meshfx@hackeriet
</td></tr>
420 <td>Channel / Frequency
</td><td>11 /
2462</td></tr>
421 <td>Cell ID
</td><td>02:BA:
00:
00:
00:
01</td>
424 <p>The reason for setting ad-hoc wifi Cell ID is to work around bugs
425 in firmware used in wifi card and wifi drivers. (See a nice post from
427 "
<a href=
"http://tiebing.blogspot.no/2009/12/ad-hoc-cell-splitting-re-post-original.html">Information
428 about cell-id splitting, stuck beacons, and failed IBSS merges!
</a>
429 for details.) When these settings are activated and you have some
430 other mesh node nearby, your computer will be connected to the mesh
431 network and can communicate with any mesh node that is connected to
432 any of the nodes in your network of nodes. :)
</p>
434 <p>My initial plan was to reuse my old Linksys WRT54GL as a mesh node,
435 but that seem to be very hard, as I have not been able to locate a
436 firmware supporting batman-adv. If anyone know how to use that old
437 wifi access point with batman-adv these days, please let me know.
</p>
439 <p>If you find this project interesting and want to join, please join
440 us on IRC, either channel
441 <a href=
"irc://irc.freenode.net/#oslohackerspace">#oslohackerspace
</a>
442 or
<a href=
"irc://irc.freenode.net/#nuug">#nuug
</a> on
443 irc.freenode.net.
</p>
445 <p>While investigating mesh networks in Oslo, I came across an old
446 research paper from the university of Stavanger and Telenor Research
447 and Innovation called
448 <a href=
"http://folk.uio.no/paalee/publications/netrel-egeland-iswcs-2008.pdf">The
449 reliability of wireless backhaul mesh networks
</a> and elsewhere
450 learned that Telenor have been experimenting with mesh networks at
451 Grünerløkka in Oslo. So mesh networks are also interesting for
452 commercial companies, even though Telenor discovered that it was hard
453 to figure out a good business plan for mesh networking and as far as I
454 know have closed down the experiment. Perhaps Telenor or others would
455 be interested in a cooperation?
</p>
457 <p><strong>Update
2013-
10-
12</strong>: I was just
458 <a href=
"http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/freedombox-discuss/2013-October/005900.html">told
459 by the Serval project developers
</a> that they no longer use
460 batman-adv (but are compatible with it), but their own crypto based
467 Tags:
<a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english
</a>,
<a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/freedombox">freedombox
</a>,
<a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/mesh network">mesh network
</a>,
<a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug
</a>.
472 <div class=
"padding"></div>
476 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Videos_about_the_Freedombox_project___for_inspiration_and_learning.html">Videos about the Freedombox project - for inspiration and learning
</a>
482 <p>The
<a href=
"http://www.freedomboxfoundation.org/">Freedombox
483 project
</a> have been going on for a while, and have presented the
484 vision, ideas and solution several places. Here is a little
485 collection of videos of talks and presentation of the project.
</p>
489 <li><a href=
"http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ukvUz5taxvA">FreedomBox -
490 2,
5 minute marketing film
</a> (Youtube)
</li>
492 <li><a href=
"http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SzW25QTVWsE">Eben Moglen
493 discusses the Freedombox on CBS news
2011</a> (Youtube)
</li>
495 <li><a href=
"http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ae8SZbxfE0g">Eben Moglen -
496 Freedom in the Cloud - Software Freedom, Privacy and and Security for
497 Web
2.0 and Cloud computing at ISOC-NY Public Meeting
2010</a>
500 <li><a href=
"http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vNaIji_3xBE">Fosdem
2011
501 Keynote by Eben Moglen presenting the Freedombox
</a> (Youtube)
</li>
503 <li><a href=
"http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9bDDUyJSQ9s">Presentation of
504 the Freedombox by James Vasile at Elevate in Gratz
2011</a> (Youtube)
</li>
506 <li><a href=
"http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zQTmnk27g9s"> Freedombox -
507 Discovery, Identity, and Trust by Nick Daly at Freedombox Hackfest New
508 York City in
2012</a> (Youtube)
</li>
510 <li><a href=
"http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tkbSB4Ba7Ck">Introduction
511 to the Freedombox at Freedombox Hackfest New York City in
2012</a>
514 <li><a href=
"http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z-P2Jaeg0aQ">Freedom, Out
515 of the Box! by Bdale Garbee at linux.conf.au Ballarat,
2012</a> (Youtube)
</li>
517 <li><a href=
"https://archive.fosdem.org/2013/schedule/event/freedombox/">Freedombox
518 1.0 by Eben Moglen and Bdale Garbee at Fosdem
2013</a> (FOSDEM)
</li>
520 <li><a href=
"http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e1LpYX2zVYg">What is the
521 FreedomBox today by Bdale Garbee at Debconf13 in Vaumarcus
522 2013</a> (Youtube)
</li>
526 <p>A larger list is available from
527 <a href=
"https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox/TalksAndPresentations">the
528 Freedombox Wiki
</a>.
</p>
530 <p>On other news, I am happy to report that Freedombox based on Debian
531 Jessie is coming along quite well, and soon both Owncloud and using
532 Tor should be available for testers of the Freedombox solution. :) In
533 a few weeks I hope everything needed to test it is included in Debian.
534 The withsqlite package is already in Debian, and the plinth package is
535 pending in NEW. The third and vital part of that puzzle is the
536 metapackage/setup framework, which is still pending an upload. Join
537 us on
<a href=
"irc://irc.debian.org:6667/%23freedombox">IRC
538 (#freedombox on irc.debian.org)
</a> and
539 <a href=
"http://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/freedombox-discuss">the
540 mailing list
</a> if you want to help make this vision come true.
</p>
546 Tags:
<a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian
</a>,
<a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english
</a>,
<a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/freedombox">freedombox
</a>,
<a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet
</a>,
<a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/surveillance">surveillance
</a>,
<a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/web">web
</a>.
551 <div class=
"padding"></div>
555 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Recipe_to_test_the_Freedombox_project_on_amd64_or_Raspberry_Pi.html">Recipe to test the Freedombox project on amd64 or Raspberry Pi
</a>
561 <p>I was introduced to the
562 <a href=
"http://www.freedomboxfoundation.org/">Freedombox project
</a>
563 in
2010, when Eben Moglen presented his vision about serving the need
564 of non-technical people to keep their personal information private and
565 within the legal protection of their own homes. The idea is to give
566 people back the power over their network and machines, and return
567 Internet back to its intended peer-to-peer architecture. Instead of
568 depending on a central service, the Freedombox will give everyone
569 control over their own basic infrastructure.
</p>
571 <p>I've intended to join the effort since then, but other tasks have
572 taken priority. But this summers nasty news about the misuse of trust
573 and privilege exercised by the "western" intelligence gathering
574 communities increased my eagerness to contribute to a point where I
575 actually started working on the project a while back.
</p>
577 <p>The
<a href=
"https://alioth.debian.org/projects/freedombox/">initial
578 Debian initiative
</a> based on the vision from Eben Moglen, is to
579 create a simple and cheap Debian based appliance that anyone can hook
580 up in their home and get access to secure and private services and
581 communication. The initial deployment platform have been the
582 <a href=
"http://www.globalscaletechnologies.com/t-dreamplugdetails.aspx">Dreamplug
</a>,
583 which is a piece of hardware I do not own. So to be able to test what
584 the current Freedombox setup look like, I had to come up with a way to install
585 it on some hardware I do have access to. I have rewritten the
586 <a href=
"https://github.com/NickDaly/freedom-maker">freedom-maker
</a>
587 image build framework to use .deb packages instead of only copying
588 setup into the boot images, and thanks to this rewrite I am able to
589 set up any machine supported by Debian Wheezy as a Freedombox, using
590 the previously mentioned deb (and a few support debs for packages
591 missing in Debian).
</p>
593 <p>The current Freedombox setup consist of a set of bootstrapping
595 (
<a href=
"https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/freedombox-setup">freedombox-setup
</a>),
596 and a administrative web interface
597 (
<a href=
"https://github.com/NickDaly/Plinth">plinth
</a> + exmachina +
598 withsqlite), as well as a privacy enhancing proxy based on
599 <a href=
"http://packages.qa.debian.org/privoxy">privoxy
</a>
600 (freedombox-privoxy). There is also a web/javascript based XMPP
601 client (
<a href=
"http://packages.qa.debian.org/jwchat">jwchat
</a>)
602 trying (unsuccessfully so far) to talk to the XMPP server
603 (
<a href=
"http://packages.qa.debian.org/ejabberd">ejabberd
</a>). The
604 web interface is pluggable, and the goal is to use it to enable OpenID
605 services, mesh network connectivity, use of TOR, etc, etc. Not much of
606 this is really working yet, see
607 <a href=
"https://github.com/NickDaly/freedombox-todos/blob/master/TODO">the
608 project TODO
</a> for links to GIT repositories. Most of the code is
609 on github at the moment. The HTTP proxy is operational out of the
610 box, and the admin web interface can be used to add/remove plinth
611 users. I've not been able to do anything else with it so far, but
612 know there are several branches spread around github and other places
613 with lots of half baked features.
</p>
615 <p>Anyway, if you want to have a look at the current state, the
616 following recipes should work to give you a test machine to poke
619 <p><strong>Debian Wheezy amd64
</strong></p>
623 <li>Fetch normal Debian Wheezy installation ISO.
</li>
624 <li>Boot from it, either as CD or USB stick.
</li>
625 <li><p>Press [tab] on the boot prompt and add this as a boot argument
626 to the Debian installer:
<p>
627 <pre>url=
<a href=
"http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox/preseed-wheezy.dat">http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox/preseed-wheezy.dat
</a></pre></li>
629 <li>Answer the few language/region/password questions and pick disk to
632 <li>When the installation is finished and the machine have rebooted a
633 few times, your Freedombox is ready for testing.
</li>
637 <p><strong>Raspberry Pi Raspbian
</strong></p>
641 <li>Fetch a Raspbian SD card image, create SD card.
</li>
642 <li>Boot from SD card, extend file system to fill the card completely.
</li>
643 <li><p>Log in and add this to /etc/sources.list:
</p>
645 deb
<a href=
"http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox/">http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox
</a> wheezy main
647 <li><p>Run this as root:
</p>
649 wget -O - http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox/BE1A583D.asc | \
652 apt-get install freedombox-setup
653 /usr/lib/freedombox/setup
655 <li>Reboot into your freshly created Freedombox.
</li>
659 <p>You can test it on other architectures too, but because the
660 freedombox-privoxy package is binary, it will only work as intended on
661 the architectures where I have had time to build the binary and put it
662 in my APT repository. But do not let this stop you. It is only a
663 short "
<tt>apt-get source -b freedombox-privoxy
</tt>" away. :)</p>
665 <p>Note that by default Freedombox is a DHCP server on the
666 192.168.1.0/24 subnet, so if this is your subnet be careful and turn
667 off the DHCP server by running "<tt>update-rc.d isc-dhcp-server
668 disable
</tt>" as root.</p>
670 <p>Please let me know if this works for you, or if you have any
671 problems. We gather on the IRC channel
672 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org:
6667/%
23freedombox
">#freedombox</a> on
673 irc.debian.org and the
674 <a href="http://lists.alioth.debian.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/freedombox-discuss
">project
675 mailing list</a>.</p>
677 <p>Once you get your freedombox operational, you can visit
678 <tt>http://your-host-name:8001/</tt> to see the state of the plint
679 welcome screen (dead end - do not be surprised if you are unable to
680 get past it), and next visit <tt>http://your-host-name:8001/help/</tt>
681 to look at the rest of plinth. The default user is 'admin' and the
682 default password is 'secret'.</p>
688 Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian
">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english
">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/freedombox
">freedombox</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet
">sikkerhet</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/surveillance
">surveillance</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/web
">web</a>.
693 <div class="padding
"></div>
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"><a href="freedombox.rss
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