Petter Reinholdtsen

I was introduced to the Freedombox project in 2010, when Eben Moglen presented his vision about serving the need of non-technical people to keep their personal information private and within the legal protection of their own homes. The idea is to give people back the power over their network and machines, and return Internet back to its intended peer-to-peer architecture. Instead of depending on a central service, the Freedombox will give everyone control over their own basic infrastructure.

I've intended to join the effort since then, but other tasks have taken priority. But this summers nasty news about the misuse of trust and privilege exercised by the "western" intelligence gathering communities increased my eagerness to contribute to a point where I actually started working on the project a while back.

The initial Debian initiative based on the vision from Eben Moglen, is to create a simple and cheap Debian based appliance that anyone can hook up in their home and get access to secure and private services and communication. The initial deployment platform have been the Dreamplug, which is a piece of hardware I do not own. So to be able to test what the current Freedombox setup look like, I had to come up with a way to install it on some hardware I do have access to. I have rewritten the freedom-maker image build framework to use .deb packages instead of only copying setup into the boot images, and thanks to this rewrite I am able to set up any machine supported by Debian Wheezy as a Freedombox, using the previously mentioned deb (and a few support debs for packages missing in Debian).

The current Freedombox setup consist of a set of bootstrapping scripts (freedombox-setup), and a administrative web interface (plinth + exmachina + withsqlite), as well as a privacy enhancing proxy based on privoxy (freedombox-privoxy). There is also a web/javascript based XMPP client (jwchat) trying (unsuccessfully so far) to talk to the XMPP server (ejabberd). The web interface is pluggable, and the goal is to use it to enable OpenID services, mesh network connectivity, use of TOR, etc, etc. Not much of this is really working yet, see the project TODO for links to GIT repositories. Most of the code is on github at the moment. The HTTP proxy is operational out of the box, and the admin web interface can be used to add/remove plinth users. I've not been able to do anything else with it so far, but know there are several branches spread around github and other places with lots of half baked features.

Anyway, if you want to have a look at the current state, the following recipes should work to give you a test machine to poke at.

Debian Wheezy amd64

1. Fetch normal Debian Wheezy installation ISO.
2. Boot from it, either as CD or USB stick.

3. Press [tab] on the boot prompt and add this as a boot argument to the Debian installer:

   url=http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox/preseed-wheezy.dat

4. Answer the few language/region/password questions and pick disk to install on.
5. When the installation is finished and the machine have rebooted a few times, your Freedombox is ready for testing.

Raspberry Pi Raspbian

1. Fetch a Raspbian SD card image, create SD card.
2. Boot from SD card, extend file system to fill the card completely.

3. Log in and add this to /etc/sources.list:

   deb http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox wheezy main
   

4. Run this as root:

   wget -O - http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox/BE1A583D.asc | \
      apt-key add -
   apt-get update
   apt-get install freedombox-setup
   /usr/lib/freedombox/setup
   

5. Reboot into your freshly created Freedombox.

You can test it on other architectures too, but because the freedombox-privoxy package is binary, it will only work as intended on the architectures where I have had time to build the binary and put it in my APT repository. But do not let this stop you. It is only a short "apt-get source -b freedombox-privoxy" away. :)

Note that by default Freedombox is a DHCP server on the 192.168.1.0/24 subnet, so if this is your subnet be careful and turn off the DHCP server by running "update-rc.d isc-dhcp-server disable" as root.

Please let me know if this works for you, or if you have any problems. We gather on the IRC channel #freedombox on irc.debian.org and the project mailing list.

Once you get your freedombox operational, you can visit http://your-host-name:8001/ to see the state of the plint welcome screen (dead end - do not be surprised if you are unable to get past it), and next visit http://your-host-name:8001/help/ to look at the rest of plinth. The default user is 'admin' and the default password is 'secret'.