First GNUnet phone call!

I was able to successfully make a phone call from my PinePhone to my laptop over GNUnet! Establishing a connection from the phone to the laptop worked, while trying it the other way around resulted in one of the clients crashing (and I wasn’t yet able to find out why exactly). Anyway, this is great!

So far my testing setup is this:

• both the laptop and the phone have an identity of their own, called ‘local’ on both devices: gnunet-identity -C local
• both have a reference to the other device through a PKEY GNS record: gnunet-namestore -z local -a -n XNAMEX -t PKEY -V XKEYX -e "1 d" -p, XNAMEX is e.g. phone and laptop, XKEYX is the other device’s public key obtained by gnunet-identity -d
• running the gnunet-conversation-gtk generated a ‘phone’ GNS record entry with the phone address, again on both devices

Then it is just about starting the gnunet-conversation-gtk app on both machines. On the phone I called the address phone.laptop.local. local is my local identity on the phone, laptop is the PKEY entry (GNS sub-zone) referencing the local entry on the laptop. And finally phone is actually taken from the laptop’s phone entry under local, created by the conversation app. This entry is not really available on the device yet. It needs to be obtained. And that is where GNS comes into play and fetches the needed data from the P2P network.

The call itself was established surprisingly quickly. Though this is likely due to both devices being on the same LAN and they probably know about each other by now.