Over the last couple of weeks I've published this site as an I2P eepsite, and as a Tor Hidden Service. This week I'm announcing Exotic Security is now available as a ZeroNet site.
http://localhost:43110/19M77j42ddq7wgvZctRSxR8Dyq7De8SGYb
I think ZeroNet is the most conceptually different network I've looked at yet. While all the other networks I've looked at have been the standard client server model, I think of ZeroNet more like a torrent file that contains a bunch of HTML pages. So you can get the files off a peer to peer network and when you view the site you're both the client and the server.
ZeroNet is designed to be censorship resistant in the same way that torrents are, but also like torrents it's not designed for privacy.
As far as I can tell there is no official way of running ZeroNet as a service. I understand that it's designed to be peer to peer so your site can still be served even if your host is offline, but I wanted to run it as a service so I know there is always at least one host seeding the latest version of my site.
These are my notes on installing ZeroNet on Debian Jessie. All commands run as root (with sudo).
apt-get install python-msgpack python-gevent
git clone https://github.com/HelloZeroNet/ZeroNet.git /opt/zeronet
useradd --system --shell /usr/sbin/nologin --home-dir /opt/zeronet zeronet
chown -R zeronet:zeronet /opt/zeronet/
vim /etc/systemd/system/zeronet.service
zeronet.service copied from Bruno Loff's Ubuntu Install
[Unit]
Description=Zeronet Server
After=syslog.target
After=network.target
[Service]
Type=simple
User=zeronet
Group=zeronet
WorkingDirectory=/opt/zeronet
ExecStart=/usr/bin/python zeronet.py
# Give a reasonable amount of time for the server to start up/shut down
TimeoutSec=300
[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target
systemctl start zeronet.service
systemctl enable zeronet.service
Getting a ZeroNet site up and running was pretty easy but I ran into some issues with my pelican site because I've been using root relative URLs but in ZeroNet my site is not running in the root of the server but instead under /19M77j42ddq7wgvZctRSxR8Dyq7De8SGYb/ so I had to go back and look at the documentation and update all the internal links in all my posts. After about half an hour with find and replace, grep and some regex I was in back in business.
