Thank you so much for publishing an article on installing ooni-probe it’s great stuff!
I am moving this thread over to ooni-dev as ooni-operators is actually meant for just important communications to operators of ooniprobe instances.
What Vasilis says is mostly correct, just a couple of minor corrections.
On July 1, 2017 at 3:14:24 PM, Vasilis (andz@torproject.org) wrote: Hi Snehan,
Snehan Kekre:
Hello excellent ooni people,
I've written a blog post (https://snehankekre.github.io/anti-censorCHIP) about installing ooniprobe on a $9 computer called CHIP that runs a flavor of Debian.
Thank you for your good words and publishing a blog post about installing ooniprobe on CHIP.
I would appreciate any feedback, suggestions, or comments. I'll use them to make necessary changes to reflect accurate delivery. I've used some images and a lot of lines from the ooni website.
The 4th step in the install section of the blog post (https://snehankekre.github.io/anti-censorCHIP#installing-ooniprobe-on-chip)%... is not needed since Step 3 will get all the available dependencies. However given that are a number of bugs (https://github.com/TheTorProject/ooni-probe/issues?q=label%3Adebian+is%3Aope... in the Debian ooniprobe packages, I will suggest you instead to install ooniprobe with pip and use the following install guide: https://github.com/TheTorProject/ooni-probe#unix-systems-with-pip
As Vasilis points out you don’t actually need to install those extra dependencies via pip and are already part of the package installation, however you should NOT install ooniprobe via pip as it’s not the best way to install packages that will run as root.
The issues with the debian package are being actively worked on and I have some sample debian packages if you would like to try them out (https://github.com/hellais/ooniprobe-fpm#debian) and as soon as they are ready the canonical torproject debian package will be updated and all the outstading issues should be resolved.
In the Step 5. you don’t actually need to run oonideckgen, but you can directly find the location of your decks by running ooniprobe --info ,it should be in /var/lib/ooni/decks.
Usually ooniprobe is more useful when it performs regular (scheduled) network measurements, I will suggest you to add the following steps to the install guide:
1. Configure ooniprobe (https://github.com/TheTorProject/ooni-probe#configuring-ooniprobe), either via the GUI (setup wizard) or from the shell (ooniprobe initialize)
2. Add ooniprobe system service (https://github.com/TheTorProject/ooni-probe#run-ooniprobe-as-a-service-syste...)
Yes this is indeed the recommended way of running it, in theory that should already be setup for you by using the debian package (but due to the debian package bugs vasilis pointed out is currently not happening).
Is there a standard format to provide credit to ooni devs?
Everything published on the website is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License (CC BY 3.0).
~ Arturo
Hi,
Arturo Filastò:
I am moving this thread over to ooni-dev as ooni-operators is actually meant for just important communications to operators of ooniprobe instances.
I guess you wanted to move this in ooni-dev instead, in any way good that you brought this thread out of ooni-operatos.
As Vasilis points out you don’t actually need to install those extra dependencies via pip and are already part of the package installation, however you should NOT install ooniprobe via pip as it’s not the best way to install packages that will run as root.
I don't see a problem with installing the ooniprobe package via pip (running as root). In contrary is a very well tested installation method that has been tested and used for some time in different systems and OSes and the default installation method for all lepidopter images.
Can you elaborate a bit more why installing ooniprobe from pip is not a recommended installation method?
Cheers, ~Vasilis
On July 2, 2017 at 12:35:34 PM, Vasilis (andz@torproject.org) wrote:
As Vasilis points out you don’t actually need to install those extra dependencies via pip and are already part of the package installation, however you should NOT install ooniprobe via pip as it’s not the best way to install packages that will run as root.
I don't see a problem with installing the ooniprobe package via pip (running as root). In contrary is a very well tested installation method that has been tested and used for some time in different systems and OSes and the default installation method for all lepidopter images.
Can you elaborate a bit more why installing ooniprobe from pip is not a recommended installation method? For a variety of reasons:
1. Older versions of pip had pretty serious security issues where packages were downloaded in plaintext
2. Still today if a depedency is not hosted on a https site pip will fail open and download it via plaintext
3. By installing packages with pip system wide you run the risk (and it’s actually quite likely) that the pip installed packages will overwrite the system installed package leading to an unstable system (this is especially common for Ubuntu where the system relies heavily of python)
I think 3. is the most important point actually, especially for a users machine.
What I wanted to add is that pip should only ever be used on users machines to install software in a virtualenvironment. It can and will break you system and once you pollute you system wide installation with packages installed with pip it’s really hard to go back to a clean slate.
I think for lepidopter it’s kind of OK at the moment, given the fact that it’s single purpose computer where the user may not mind if some other python software on the system breaks.
~ A.
ooni-talk@lists.torproject.org