anonvm

evergreen .. anon as an appliance (aaaa!) :D

Introduction

The anon project, written mostly in PHP as back-end, stashed in the Arctic-CodeVault, depends on older system logic in order to run as expected; therefore the hard-drive image in this repository contains everything needed to run Anon.

Installation

The installation process is rather simple, however it depends on the OS you are running; though the following happens during installation:

1. the installer checks if virt-manager is available, if not - the installer exits moaning about it
2. the anonvm repository is cloned to the local machine at the (optional) path specified at install (or deploy) command; if none was given, the current working directory (folder in terminal path) is used as install target
3. the virt-manager CLI is used to register the anonvm-disk-image as local vm, copied to the path specified in step 2 (above)
4. the anonvm command is copied to the current user's ~/.local/bin folder
5. if the ~/.local/bin path is not in the current user's environment $PATH, it is set in this step

Dependencies

• Operating System: Linux (with para-virtualization enabled)
• packages: bash virt-manager virsh npm nodejs chromium
• disk space: 4Gb (recommended: 20Gb)

the download size is ~4Gb .. though copied in fragments, 3x this is needed to unpack, but uses only 4Gb after install

the normal way

1. run the following command: npm install anonvm
2. follow the prompts on screen
3. proceed with how to use anonvm
4. ignore the rest of these install instructions, you are ready to use anon

the minimal way

1. download the .qcow2 image, or clone this repository
2. import that image as an appliance using virt-manager (qemu)
3. start/stop the machine as you see fit, though all the anonvm commands below won't work

Using AnonVM

If you've installed Anon using the normal way, you can now access it via CLI -which is also used to launch the GUI as follows:

[user@host ~]$ anonvm init client   # starts GUI (after starting server)
[user@host ~]$ anonvm stop client   # keeps  CLI running

[user@host ~]$ anonvm init server   # starts CLI (after stopping - if running)
[user@host ~]$ anonvm stop server   # stops  CLI (if running) .. won't fail

Troubleshooting

If you're having issues, or just feel like experimenting, here are some commands that could help:

# after installing .. cd to inside the cloned repo folder:

[user@host anonvm]$ npm run deploy . # installs anonvm from here, or any folder path to where the anonvm binaries should live
[user@host anonvm]$ npm run remove   # removes  anonvm entirely from your system