Check installation

Check if ouroboros works.

To check if everything is installed correctly, you can now jump into the Tutorials section, or you can try to ping this webhost over ouroboros using the name ouroboros.rocks.oping

Our webserver is of course on an IP network, and ouroboros does not control IP, but it can run over UDP/IP.

To be able to contact our server over ouroboros, you will need to do some small DNS configuration: to tell the ouroboros UDP system that the process “ouroboros.rocks.oping” is running on our webserver by add the line

51.38.114.133      1bf2cb4fb361f67a59907ef7d2dc5290

to your /etc/hosts file12.

Here are the steps to ping our server over ouroboros:

Run the IRMd:

$ sudo irmd &

Then you will need find your (private) IP address and start an ouroboros UDP daemon (ipcpd-udp) on that interface:

$ irm ipcp bootstrap type udp name udp layer udp ip <your local ip address>

Now you can ping our server:

$ oping -n ouroboros.rocks.oping

The output from the IRM daemon should look something like this (in DEBUG mode):

[dstaesse@heteropoda build]$ sudo irmd --stdout
==01749== irmd(II): Ouroboros IPC Resource Manager daemon started...
==01749== irmd(II): Created IPCP 1781.
==01781== ipcpd/udp(DB): Bootstrapped IPCP over UDP with pid 1781.
==01781== ipcpd/udp(DB): Bound to IP address 192.168.66.233.
==01781== ipcpd/udp(DB): Using port 3435.
==01781== ipcpd/udp(DB): DNS server address is not set.
==01781== ipcpd/ipcp(DB): Locked thread 140321690191424 to CPU 7/8.
==01749== irmd(II): Bootstrapped IPCP 1781 in layer udp.
==01781== ipcpd/ipcp(DB): Locked thread 140321681798720 to CPU 6/8.
==01781== ipcpd/ipcp(DB): Locked thread 140321673406016 to CPU 1/8.
==01781== ipcpd/udp(DB): Allocating flow to 1bf2cb4f.
==01781== ipcpd/udp(DB): Destination UDP ipcp resolved at 51.38.114.133.
==01781== ipcpd/udp(DB): Flow to 51.38.114.133 pending on fd 64.
==01749== irmd(II): Flow on flow_id 0 allocated.
==01781== ipcpd/udp(DB): Flow allocation completed on eids (64, 64).
==01749== irmd(DB): Partial deallocation of flow_id 0 by process 1800.
==01749== irmd(II): Completed deallocation of flow_id 0 by process 1781.
==01781== ipcpd/udp(DB): Flow with fd 64 deallocated.
==01749== irmd(DB): Dead process removed: 1800.

If connecting to ouroboros.rocks.oping failed, you are probably behind a NAT firewall that is actively blocking outbound UDP port 3435.

  1. This is the IP address of our server and the MD5 hash of the string ouroboros.rocks.oping. To check if this is configured correctly, you should be able to ping the server with ping 1bf2cb4fb361f67a59907ef7d2dc5290 from the command line.

    [return]

  2. The ipcpd-udp allows setting up a (private) DDNS server and using the Ouroboros irm name API to populate it, instead of requiring each node to manually edit the /etc/hosts file. While we technically could also set up such a DNS on our server for demo purposes, it is just too likely that it would be abused. The Internet is a nasty place.

    [return]
Last modified January 3, 2021