also just known as regular socks if you use i2p
sploodged
joined 5 months ago
it's generally advisable to not run a vpn in front of i2p. it will run better without one and you introduce another point of failure that can reduce your anonymity in some circumstances.
you can use a vpn for clearnet like normal along with i2p,ideally i2p not through the vpn though. it's a good way to cross-seed stuff into i2p though (you can do this as you're downloading from clearnet peers) and every now and again might find some random i2p seed holdout on a "rare" torrent.
we're trying, also some clients will let you do that. snark and XD are i2p only, qbittorrent and bigly bt will let you pull peers from clearnet and i2p if they've been cross-seeded
i run i2p on rpi 3's, you can modify some things so it uses less resources. the 3's won't handle being a floodfill very well from what i've found so make sure you have that off. also i've only ever tested this headless, not sure if using gui or not. overall unless you want to do a lot of file transfers or really want to use the included features in the java router id recommend sticking to i2pd with the rpis.
biggest thing is i2pd uses way less resources. really shines for low power devices and for running long-term as a transit node. i notice pages load faster and had less issues with irc. the default tunnels is 5000 so i'd change it to maybe 3000 in config file if you're pushing a lot of traffic through it. even so it never seems to fully utilize the cpu.
java uses much more memory and hammers the cpu. i've found for whatever reason i can achieve more overall throughput though, so i run java on a couple 3's. You can also set the max memory for the java router to lower. Seems to me that overall number of tunnels consume more memory (much more in java) and throughput is limited by cpu. you can reduce the number of participating tunnels if it gets unstable. I also overclock the cpu a bit to around 1300.
also i wouldn't personally give access to the router directly if you care about maintaining anonymity. you can access it safely with vpn/ssh. you could probably do some sort of in-proxy if you want other people to be able to use i2p without needing a router, i've never done this myself though.
easiest to get going is probably https://geti2p.net/en/download/easyinstall
when you get it running allow the router to run for a while. the longer you leave it running the better connected it'll become, it takes some time to get well connected into the network. torrenting right away is a good way to speedrun this since it'll discover a lot of peers this way. to browse eepsites (.i2p domains, kind of like .onion) router needs to be running, and need to change proxy settings in browser.
there are guides and plugins for this but basically you want to set http proxy to 127.0.0.1 port 4444. it will proxy everything through the router. clearnet sites should go through the default outproxy (stormycloud) but i2p isn't really build for clearnet browsing. if it's working should be able to visit an eepsite like http://notbob.i2p (has a registry of other eepsites). things like trackers, forums, git repositories can be found on notbob.
can setup irc through it (comes preconfigured) and has built in torrent client (i2psnark). can also setup email, java router has that built in, as well as a webserver to host your own site through i2p.
if you just want to torrent biglybt comes with a router on its own, settings under "i2p helper" plugin if you just want to torrent through it without all the other stuff.
good to hear, couple new uploaders have been popping up so maybe things will get more rounded
nothing has changed, qbittorrent doesn't yet support i2p's dht. snark and bigly bt are the only two that do at the moment.
there are open trackers in i2p that can help with peer discovery so in most cases it's a non-issue but i hope libtorrent supports it soon. I ended up switching to bigly bt in part because of this, it's a beefy client with a lot of options but it's i2p support is solid.