Re: Freenet on Embedded Systems

[Matthew John Toseland]

On 03/09/17 18:36, Matthew John Toseland wrote:
> On 23/08/17 19:57, Arne Babenhauserheide wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> I think such a device would be awesome! If combined with the icicles
>> app, it could make using darknet very convenient.
>>
>> This could also serve as darknet peer to a node which runs on another
>> computer.
> 
> Agreed! For any sort of darknet to be viable, we need it to be easy to
> run full-time nodes.
> 
> Moving most of the duties of WoT to a separate device, e.g. your laptop,
> is an interesting idea.

To elaborate, WoT is the bit that users will most want to use full disk
encryption etc. As well as being more demanding technically. Ideally
we'd use some sort of deniable partly-on-network storage. There are
various ideas for this.

Of course we'll need help from the node. We could perhaps have it poll
the USKs for us while WoT is not running, for example.

So in the long run we probably want to split WoT up - part of it will
run on the node, and poll the forums in such a way that it is hard to
distinguish from any other user. The other part will run on the client
(potentially also on the node, but not necessarily), and handle the
individual user's actions as well as the UI.



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Re: Freenet on Embedded Systems

[Matthew John Toseland]

On 23/08/17 19:57, Arne Babenhauserheide wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I think such a device would be awesome! If combined with the icicles
> app, it could make using darknet very convenient.
> 
> This could also serve as darknet peer to a node which runs on another
> computer.

Agreed! For any sort of darknet to be viable, we need it to be easy to
run full-time nodes.

Moving most of the duties of WoT to a separate device, e.g. your laptop,
is an interesting idea.
> 
> Steve Dougherty  writes:
> 
>> To run Freenet it'd need robust storage and a fair amount of RAM; when
>> I ran a Freenet node on a Raspberry Pi 2 (1 GiB RAM; MicroSD card
>> rootfs and USB ports) with Freenet installed to a USB hard drive, the
>> USB drive kept disconnecting (maybe due to flakiness under load?),
>> causing filesystem corruption and kernel panics. When I moved the
>> Freenet installation to the MicroSD card, not long after the
>> filesystem started to, if memory serves, refuse to accept writes.
> 
> Since this is a problem we’ve seen in the past, and since this will be
> an always-on device (many¹ USB hard drives have problems with sustained
> load, and many¹ SD cards aren’t built for constaint rewriting), I’d
> suggest using 512 MiB of pure ram-storage. Then we could guarantee that
> freenet would not create strain on the device.

Ugh. Say goodbye to data persistence.

There ought to be a solution to this. Even if it means finding a
manufacturing partner. Pi's aren't known for their stability in the
first place. Also, it would be perfectly reasonable to implement
software workarounds for these sorts of things... of course that means
the network has to deal with the flakiness...
> 
> ¹: It doesn’t matter that there are ones which work well if we cannot
>guarantee that users will have one which works well.

Which is why we'd need to find one and ship it.

But yes, most hard drives, USB or not, aren't engineered to run
constantly. However it is easy to obtain drives that *can* run
constantly. They just cost a bit more. And tend not to have a USB interface.
> 
>> So whatever this does use it'll need good storage one way or
>> another. I had some flavor of https://nextthing.co/pages/chip in mind,
>> but haven't tested running Freenet on such a system yet. Either way it
>> couldn't handle something memory-heavy like Sone, and maybe not WoT
>> either. (For reference my Freenet node with both of those is currently
>> sitting at about 2 GiB resident.) Hopefully a base node would work.
> 
> My base nodes without WoT work well with roughly 500MiB of memory and
> just about 10% load (on a 2x800MHz system).

Yeah, on plausible home connections Freenet could reasonably run on a Pi
(at least in RAM and CPU terms), although we might have issues with JITs.
> 
> Best wishes,
> Arne
>



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Re: Freenet on Embedded Systems

[xor]

On Wednesday, August 23, 2017 05:22:28 AM Steve Dougherty wrote:
> To run Freenet it'd need robust storage and a fair amount of RAM; when I ran
> a Freenet node on a Raspberry Pi 2 (1 GiB RAM; MicroSD card rootfs and USB
> ports) with Freenet installed to a USB hard drive, the USB drive kept
> disconnecting (maybe due to flakiness under load?), causing filesystem
> corruption and kernel panics. When I moved the Freenet installation to the
> MicroSD card, not long after the filesystem started to, if memory serves,
> refuse to accept writes. So whatever this does use it'll need good storage
> one way or another. I had some flavor of https://nextthing.co/pages/chip in
> mind, but haven't tested running Freenet on such a system yet.

mrsteveman1 says that there are MicroSD cards labeled as for "industrial" 
purposes which should be able to handle the load.

I would thus suggest to use those and go for a Raspberry Pi 3 as it is the 
most popular embedded computer. The more we go for standard solutions the 
easier everything will hopefully be.

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Re: Freenet on Embedded Systems

[Arne Babenhauserheide]

Hi,

I think such a device would be awesome! If combined with the icicles
app, it could make using darknet very convenient.

This could also serve as darknet peer to a node which runs on another
computer.

Steve Dougherty  writes:

> To run Freenet it'd need robust storage and a fair amount of RAM; when
> I ran a Freenet node on a Raspberry Pi 2 (1 GiB RAM; MicroSD card
> rootfs and USB ports) with Freenet installed to a USB hard drive, the
> USB drive kept disconnecting (maybe due to flakiness under load?),
> causing filesystem corruption and kernel panics. When I moved the
> Freenet installation to the MicroSD card, not long after the
> filesystem started to, if memory serves, refuse to accept writes.

Since this is a problem we’ve seen in the past, and since this will be
an always-on device (many¹ USB hard drives have problems with sustained
load, and many¹ SD cards aren’t built for constaint rewriting), I’d
suggest using 512 MiB of pure ram-storage. Then we could guarantee that
freenet would not create strain on the device.

¹: It doesn’t matter that there are ones which work well if we cannot
   guarantee that users will have one which works well.

> So whatever this does use it'll need good storage one way or
> another. I had some flavor of https://nextthing.co/pages/chip in mind,
> but haven't tested running Freenet on such a system yet. Either way it
> couldn't handle something memory-heavy like Sone, and maybe not WoT
> either. (For reference my Freenet node with both of those is currently
> sitting at about 2 GiB resident.) Hopefully a base node would work.

My base nodes without WoT work well with roughly 500MiB of memory and
just about 10% load (on a 2x800MHz system).

Best wishes,
Arne
-- 
Unpolitisch sein
heißt politisch sein
ohne es zu merken


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Freenet on Embedded Systems

[Steve Dougherty]

-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-
Hash: SHA256

Hi everyone,

A few years ago Allan (comradekingu) had an idea about selling small 
pre-configured Freenet systems. While I think we're still probably 
underresourced to support such an undertaking, I did have ideas about what one 
might look like.

If you're not familiar with the Chromecast setup process: a Chromecast fresh 
out of packaging is to be connected to a display and a power source. It then 
becomes a WiFi access point, and Chromecast mobile apps connect to it and allow 
configuring the Chromecast and giving it the WiFi password. Then the AP turns 
off, the Chromecast connects to the normal WiFi, and is accessible over the 
network. An embedded Freenet system could do something similar: offer an AP 
which captive-portals Fred's first run setup. (Along with prompts for WiFi 
access, or an Ethernet connection. We'd want 
https://github.com/freenet/plugin-UPnP2 too.)

To run Freenet it'd need robust storage and a fair amount of RAM; when I ran a 
Freenet node on a Raspberry Pi 2 (1 GiB RAM; MicroSD card rootfs and USB ports) 
with Freenet installed to a USB hard drive, the USB drive kept disconnecting 
(maybe due to flakiness under load?), causing filesystem corruption and kernel 
panics. When I moved the Freenet installation to the MicroSD card, not long 
after the filesystem started to, if memory serves, refuse to accept writes. So 
whatever this does use it'll need good storage one way or another. I had some 
flavor of https://nextthing.co/pages/chip in mind, but haven't tested running 
Freenet on such a system yet. Either way it couldn't handle something 
memory-heavy like Sone, and maybe not WoT either. (For reference my Freenet 
node with both of those is currently sitting at about 2 GiB resident.) 
Hopefully a base node would work.

Thoughts?

- - Steve
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