Home Server

The quickest way to get started is as follows. You will need to be running a Debian based system (version 8 or later), have an old but still working laptop or netbook which you can use as a server, and 8GB or larger USB thumb drive and an ethernet cable to connect the laptop to your internet router.

First you will need to create an image.

sudo su
apt-get -y install build-essential libc6-dev-i386 \
gcc-multilib g++-multilib git python-docutils mktorrent \
vmdebootstrap xz-utils dosfstools btrfs-tools extlinux \
python-distro-info mbr qemu-user-static binfmt-support \
u-boot-tools qemu
git clone https://github.com/bashrc/freedombone
cd freedombone
git checkout stockholm
make install
freedombone-image -t i386 -s 7.8G --onion yes

This takes a while. Maybe an hour or so, depending on the speed of your system and the internets. The good news though is that once created you can use the resulting image any number of times, and you don't need to trust some pre-built image.

List what drives are on your system with:

ls /dev/sd*

Now plug in the USB thumb drive, and do the same again. Notice which drive letter gets added.

You can now copy the image to the USB thumb drive, replacing sdX with the identifier of the USB thumb drive. Don't include any numbers (so for example use sdc instead of sdc1).

dd bs=1M if=myimagefile.img of=/dev/sdX conv=fdatasync

And wait. Again it will take a while to copy over. When that's done plug it into the laptop or netbook which you want to use as a server, power on and set the BIOS to boot from the USB stick.

As the system boots for the first time the login is:

username: fbone
password: freedombone

You will then be shown a large new password. It's very important that you write this down somewhere before going further, because you'll need this to log in later.

You'll be asked to set a username and a "real" name (or nickname), then the rest of the installation will be automatic. Again, it takes a while, so go and do something less boring instead.

When it's installed on your local system open a terminal and run:

ssh myusername@freedombone.local -p 2222

Use the password you wrote down earlier to log in.

Select the administrator control panel with up and down cursor keys, space bar and enter key. You might need to re-enter your password. Then select About. You'll see a list of sites and their onion addresses.

On your local system open a Tor compatible browser and enter your blog's onion address. If it's all working then you should see your new blog.

Congratulations! You have now become a citizen of the free internet.

Use your new powers wisely.

Of course, this is just one way in which you can install the Freedombone system. If you have a single board computer (SBC) such as a BeagleBone Black or OLinuxino you can make disk images for those too. You can even create clearnet sites if you have your own domain name. ARM boards with closed proprietary boot blobs are not supported. For more details run:

man freedombone-image