Freenet - what is the latest recommendation?

I really need to get Freenet working in Whonix. I had this going once before, following the instructions for riseup VPN using openvpn. But I lost that Riseup account and I don’t know how to get another one. Freenet will not work natively in Whonix because Tor does not support UDP. I tried the Riseup VPN that doesn’t require registration (Bitmask) but it doesn’t work. Freenet never makes any connections to peers.

Hi anna1

Welcome to the Whonix community!

As you know udp is not supported over Tor. You can find a free VPN service provider so you can tunnel udp over Tor.

A Whonix forum search returns a few threads on the subject.

http://forums.dds6qkxpwdeubwucdiaord2xgbbeyds25rbsgr73tbfpqpt4a6vjwsyd.onion/search?q=Freenet

This may be helpful when looking for a service provider.

https://whonix.org/wiki/Comparison_Of_Tor_with_CGI_Proxies,_Proxy_Chains,_and_VPN_Services#Criteria_for_Reviewing_VPN_Providers

1 Like

For reference:

Thanks for the replies The difficulty here is “find a free VPN service provider”

Some things that might be of interest to Freenet users:

If I run Freenet on non-Whonix OS WITH Riseup publically available VPN (Bitmask). Then examine the last line of the noderef, which is the IPs Freent has discovered, encoded in Base64, Freenet has, yes, discovered the VPN assigned WAN ip. But it has also recorded the isp assigned WAN ip. Clearly then, not everything is going through the VPN. Freenet knows the ISP assigned ip. This is obviously a disaster for complete anonymity in Freenet.
The reason it is necessary to run Freenet in Whonix is: there is no way for Freenet to discover the true ip. But for that we need a VPN that is known to tunnel udp. The ONLY time I got this to work was with the Riseup Red VPN, because it supports OpenVPN. I don’t know of a free VPN service that supports OpenVPN, but I will keep looking.

Unless someone would be kind enough to PM me a Riseup invite code and I can see if I can get this working again