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Installing MLDonkey 3.2.1
How to have MLDonkey running on a Debian 12 Bookworm.
Compiling the source code
The compilation procedure can be executed on a development machine, where you install all the required packages. Then you can copy only the mlnet binary into the production host.
Download the source code from the new GitHub repository (the old Sourceforge repository was abandoned in August 2023). We downloaded the tag Release 3.2.1.
mkdir -p /usr/local/src/mldonkey cd /usr/local/src/mldonkey wget https://github.com/ygrek/mldonkey/archive/refs/tags/release-3-2-1.zip unzip mldonkey-release-3-2-1.zip
Some Debian packages are required to make the basic compile. We don't need the GUI, so we compile to have only the Command Line Interface (CLI) and the web interface; the package liblablgtk2-gnome-ocaml-dev referred by the build instructions is not required:
apt install ocaml camlp4 libnum-ocaml-dev
You may want to install some additional libraries to get more options working:
apt install libmagic-dev libgd-dev libbz2-dev
/usr/local/src/mldonkey/mldonkey-release-3-2-1 ./configure make make install
The binary mlnet can be copied into another machine (/usr/local/bin/ is the suggested directory). You can verify tha all the libraries are insalled using the command ldd mlnet.
Running as non-privileged user
mkdir /var/lib/mldonkey
addgroup --system mldonkey
adduser --system --home /var/lib/mldonkey --no-create-home \
--shell /usr/sbin/nologin --ingroup mldonkey mldonkey
chown -h mldonkey:mldonkey /var/lib/mldonkey
chown -R mldonkey:mldonkey /var/lib/mldonkey/
su --shell=/bin/bash - mldonkey
If the program is started by the root user, you can force a setuid to the non privileged user by settings into the downloads.ini the following option:
run_as_useruid = 128
Need to create a systemd unit to start the program.
Logging
mkdir /var/log/mldonkey chown -R mldonkey:mldonkey /var/log/mldonkey
Need to create the /etc/logrotate.d/mldonkey-server logrotate file.
Initializing the server list
To start a client you need a list of servers https://www.emule-security.org/serverlist/
telnet localhost 4000
> n 45.82.80.155 5687 New server 45.82.80.155:5687
Initializing the Kademlia network
As explained by this eMule FAQ, a list of some other users already connected to the Kademlia network can be downloaded here: http://upd.emule-security.org/nodes.dat.
Copy the nodes.dat file into the MLDonkey home directory and execute the following MLDonkey command line:
> kad_load nodes.dat 285 overnet peers loaded
Then you can check if the connection succeeded:
> kad_stats Kademlia is enabled Kademlia Connectivity: NOT enough online peers ,there maybe a problem with incoming udp packets
It is possibile also to boot the Kademlia network with just one peer using the command:
> kad_boot <ip> <port>
The Kademlia network is not properly initialized if you have zero peers:
> kad_boots Boot peers: 0