After I started looking into I2P a bit more again I noticed several things need some fixing here …

So I’ve been busy with other parts of life and concerning I2P only kept the router running and checked that this blog is still reachable. I also clicked on the webmail (susimail) a few times to check there’s nothing there — or so I thought.

IRC and nick-registry

My registered nick on IRC had expired. I asked on IRC about it:

12:15:44 < pipoi> lbt: "If a registered nick is not used by the owner for 1095 
                  days, 
12:15:44 < pipoi> NickServ will drop the nickname, allowing it to be 
                  reregistered."

While I was able to re-register it (it’s lbt), any impostor could have done that in the mean-time. So letting this happen is a really bad thing in general. In my specific case it probably wouldn’t have mattered too much … But having this blog running with according references still makes it feel wrong. So note to self: Need to do a few more things than just keeping the router/blog running ;)

Mails and Susimail

Turns out I completely disregarded the notice of postman that non-used accounts will expire after 100 days. Ugh … And I even wasted postman’s time for finding this out :( Well, I was able to re-create the account using the old name. But I need to either login there regularly or set-up my own mail-server (I would have watched after that, I guess). An i2p-only mail-server would be an interesting project, by I think to have read setting it up for an anonymous environment is kind of difficult. Will see if I find the time to look into that …

Anyhow, if anyone sent me any mail in the last years, then those are lost :( Kind of a pity. For example I used that to nominate I2P for the LibrePlanet back then. If anyone should read this and recall to have sent me some mail, then please consider re-sending it if that seems approriate. And after I have created a new GPG-key, as the old one has expired last year already …

GPG

My key expired 2018-01-22. So this is another thing I need to take care of. Should start putting such dates into a calendar so I get remembered even if currently not actively using them. Thing about this anonymous-stuff is, that I always think I shouldn’t mix that with the real-world if I really wanna try out staying anonymous. Right? Anyhow, let me un-expire that key:

lbt@i2p:~$ gpg --edit-key 1839053F296DCDAB3E7827F24D941CE426FDCC88
gpg> expire
Key is valid for? (0) 1y
gpg> key 1
gpg> expire
Key is valid for? (0) 1y

Here I first set a new expiry on the main key, then select the subkey and repeat the procedure for that.

To put the public key on the web-site I then exported it:

lbt@anon-i2p:~$ gpg --armor --export 1839053F296DCDAB3E7827F24D941CE426FDCC88 > lbt.pub.asc
lbt@anon-i2p:~$ cp lbt.pub.asc /var/lib/i2p/i2p-config/eepsite/docroot/static/

I2P Bote

I was able to start I2P Bote, but upon clicking on it (after it appeared) in the console, I just got a 404 error. Inquiring about this I was told:

12:18:07 < eche|off> bote may have a issue with libtomcat
12:18:43 < eche|off> more on https://trac.i2p2.de/ticket/2644

I checked with my old howto for Bote and wanted to check plugins.i2p, but only got web-site unreachables (over several days now). Then again, even zzz.i2p was unreachable for two tries and only worked on the third just now. But for now I decided to drop Bote from my communications plan. In the trac ticket #2644 zzz wrote

Bote is unmaintained, if the fix has to be on the Bote side it won’t happen soon.

From what I read it is an issue like replacing the packaged tomcat. And besides that comment it seemed echelon even started looking into it. But for me this at the moment seems too unstable to use as a default communication channel — that was my intention three years ago …

Conclusion

I think I should setup a server for some accepted communication channel. Then, even if I don’t use it for several years, I probably still would maintain it and not risk impostors taking my place. Although this wouldn’t matter much at the moment, I just dislike the idea. Maybe it has to be email (that old fart never dies, does it?), but maybe I can come up with some interesting alternative. An XMPP server might be a viable option. And concerning IRC: having ones own server probably would solve the registered-nick-problem as well. So again, many things to check out here …

To be clear: This is no criticism towards the operators of those services mentioned above. In the opposite, thx 2 those guys! They use rules to keep those services alive. And mail and irc are like distributed services (in a way at least) that one could (and therefore should) care about ones own. Right?

Also, after removing I2P-Bote from the footer and updating my GPG, I will register lbt.i2p for this address now. Maybe someone besides me, myself, and I can benefit from these notes …

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