Ability setup on own server.

[BorderlessNomad]

Is it possible to install and run streisand on own server i.e. private-cloud running Ubuntu 14.04.1?

[nogweii]

You indeed can. See the paragraph after step 4 of Execution in the README. You'll have to edit the inventory file and run ansible directly, rather than using the provided streisand script.

[jlund]

Yes, you can run Streisand on any Debian server. There are known issues with Ubuntu 14.04. Specifically, its AppArmor profiles prevent Tor pluggable transports from functioning properly which breaks the obfs3 and ScrambleSuit setup tasks.

The latest version of Debian is the only fully tested distribution at this time, though several people have reported success on Ubuntu 12.04.

I'm going to keep this open to remind me to make the existing server setup instructions a little more clear.

[BorderlessNomad]

Thanks @evaryont and @jlund finally I was able to run streisand w/o any issue on Debian 7.6.

[faddat]

Howdy folks-- so here's an oddity:

I got streisand running on my CentOS box, deployed 3 nodes no trouble at all. What's the takeaway here? I did a whole bunch of configuration, but not certain exactly what, then pop and wow!

Today I am going to try and enshrine Streisand in a .iso, making her more accessible to less technical users. With any luck, Streisand.iso will go up on thepiratebay.org later today, and anywhere else I can conceivably put it. She'll be a debian 7.0 iso.

[jlund]

@ahirmayur Good to hear!

@faddat That's surprising and interesting. Every role uses the APT Ansible module to install packages, not Yum. It looks like you can install apt-get on CentOS though. I assume you had to do that at least? It's really cool that it's working!

I like the idea of an .iso for simple setup on home servers and dedicated hardware, but it would be important to do it correctly so that each new install also generated new encryption keys, shared secrets, etc. If the .iso installation process didn't do this then every server would have identical credentials and keys, which would make it easy to sniff the traffic of other users. I don't have any experience with .iso generation or making a custom installer, but let me know if there is anything that I can do to help!

[faddat]

@jlund I didn't deploy striesand onto CentOS- instead, I installed it on CentOS & used it as a deployment vessel. What would be best of course would be if my HK VPS supplier would just let me run debian, but wish in one hand, defecate in the other-- see which one gets filled first.

As for the ISO's I'm also thinking the launcher part of Streisand. I'm going to try to create a stripped down distro that does nothing but install Streisand, and try to make it something that can deploy from a VM instance.

[hoseinit]

@faddat can you explain how to install it on CentOS as my own VPN server and socks server ?

[BorderlessNomad]

@hoseinit you will have to edit inventory file and uncomment last two lines

[streisand-host]

255.255.255.255 # This should be replaced with your actual IP address

Next is to update ansible.cfg

Then run the Streisand playbook directly:

ansible-playbook playbooks/streisand.yml

For more details read docs, https://github.com/jlund/streisand#execution

[hoseinit]

@ahirmayur as far as I got I should install it in my desktop then run it to install it on my centos server yes ?

[jlund]

@hoseinit Streisand is designed to run on Debian 7, and Ubuntu 14.04 support is on my roadmap. You can use Streisand to create a new server from scratch on many popular providers. Most providers offer Debian 7 or Ubuntu 12.04 images as options which means that you can use it to get something running just about anywhere.

Streisand will not be able to configure a CentOS or RHEL system without significant modifications.

[wicknet]

A quick ping to check if supporting a more modern, mainstream and "pure" upstream distro like Debian 8 is under consideration? Streisand works well on Ubuntu 14.04, but Trusty is showing it's age, to say nothing of it's quirks.

[jlund]

Ubuntu 16.04 was released less than a week ago, making it more "modern" than Debian 8 by some definitions :) In any event, Xenial will become the new base distribution once most hosting providers have finished rolling out their images--probably within the next month or so.

Using only the LTS releases (as opposed to switching to something like version 15.10 when it came out last October, for example) ensures that any users who keep a Streisand server around for an extended period of time won't be left behind on APT security updates. Additionally, as far as being "mainstream" is concerned, Ubuntu is officially available on many, many, many more providers than Debian is. That ubiquity is important to me because I want lots of people to be able to use it.

While I respect, love, and use Debian a lot, I'm personally much more concerned about fighting censorship in as many places as possible than I am about, say, whether or not Ubuntu should have signed an unpure trademark agreement with Mozilla to use the Firefox name and logo. (Although I will readily admit that the Iceweasel replacement logo is pretty dope.)

Also, it looks like I forgot to close this issue. You can see that the initial post was someone wanting to run Streisand on Ubuntu 14.04 back when Debian 7 was the base distro, and now the penultimate post will be someone wanting to use Debian 8 instead of Ubuntu 14.04. The symmetry is absolutely beautiful.

You can never make everyone 100% happy, though I am doing my best to try.

[hydrandt]

BTW Firefox is back in Debian! :-)

http://news.softpedia.com/news/debian-finally-switches-iceweasel-name-back-to-firefox-500966.shtml