"The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it." - John Gilmore; TIME magazine (6 December 1993)

OONI, the Open Observatory of Network Interference, is a global observation network which aims is to collect high quality data using open methodologies, using Free and Open Source Software (FL/OSS) to share observations and data about the various types, methods, and amounts of network tampering in the world.

To run OONI-probe without having to install it you must tell python that it can import modules from the root of ooni-probe, as well as initialize the included submodules.

Basic requirements:

• Git: http://git-scm.com/book/en/Getting-Started-Installing-Git
• Python >= 2.6: http://www.python.org/download/releases/
• pip: http://www.pip-installer.org/en/latest/

On debian based systems these can be installed with:

sudo apt-get install git-core python python-pip python-dev build-essential

The python dependencies required for running ooniprobe are:

• Tor (>2.2.x): https://torproject.org/
• Twisted (>12.1.0): https://twistedmatrix.com/trac/
• PyYAML: http://pyyaml.org/
• Scapy: http://www.secdev.org/projects/scapy/
  • pypcap: https://code.google.com/p/pypcap/
  • libdnet: https://code.google.com/p/libdnet/
• txtorcon: https://github.com/meejah/txtorcon
• txsocksx: https://github.com/hellais/txsocksx

To get the latest version of Tor you should do the following (from: https://www.torproject.org/docs/debian):

# put in here the value of lsb_release -c (ex. oneirc for ubuntu 11.10 or squeeze for debian 6.0)
export DISTRIBUTION="squeeze"
echo "deb http://deb.torproject.org/torproject.org $DISTRIBUTION main" >> /etc/apt/sources.list
gpg --keyserver keys.gnupg.net --recv 886DDD89
gpg --export A3C4F0F979CAA22CDBA8F512EE8CBC9E886DDD89 | sudo apt-key add -
apt-get update
apt-get install tor

You are highly recommended to install python packages from inside of a virtual environment, since pip does not download the packages via SSL and you will need to install it system wide.

This will require you to have installed virtualenv.

sudo apt-get install python-virtualenv virtualenvwrapper

To create a new virtual environment do

mkdir $HOME/.virtualenvs
mkvirtualenv ooni-probe

You will automatically enter the environment. To re-enter this environment in the future, type:

workon ooni-probe

For convenience, you may want to add the following to your .bashrc:

if [ -e ~/ooni-probe/bin ]; then
    export PATH=~/ooni-probe/bin:$PATH
fi
if [ -e ~/ooni-probe ]; then
    export PYTHONPATH=$PYTHONPATH:~/ooni-probe
fi

Add the following to $HOME/.virtualenvs/ooni-probe/bin/postactivate to automatically cd into the working directory upon activation.

if [ -e ~/ooni-probe ] ; then
    cd ~/ooni-probe
fi

Clone the ooniprobe repository:

git clone https://git.torproject.org/ooni-probe.git
cd ooni-probe

Then install OONI with:

pip install -r requirements.txt

If you are not in a virtualenv you will have to run the above command as root:

sudo pip install -r requirements.txt

It's ideal to install these manually since the ones in debian or ubuntu are not up to date.

If you don't already have Subversion installed:

sudo apt-get install subversion

For libdnet:

wget https://libdnet.googlecode.com/files/libdnet-1.12.tgz
tar xzf libdnet-1.12.tgz
cd libdnet-1.12
./configure  && make
cd python/
python setup.py install
cd ../../ && rm -rf libdnet-1.12*

For pypcap:

git clone https://github.com/hellais/pypcap
cd pypcap/
pip install pyrex
make && make install
cd ../ && rm -rf pypcap-read-only

Including geografical information on where your probe is located helps us better assess the value of the test. You can personalize these setting from inside of ooniprobe.conf

If you wish to include geografical data in the test report, you will have to go to the data/ directory and run:

make geoip

Then edit your ooniprobe.conf to point to the absolute path of where the data/ directory is located for example:

geoip_data_dir: /home/your_user/ooni-probe/data/

To see the possible command line options run:

./bin/ooniprobe --help 

For interesting tests to run look in the nettests/core/ directory.

To run a test you can do so with:

./bin/ooniprobe -o report_file_name path/to/test.py

Normally tests take options, you can see them with:

./bin/ooniprobe -o report_file_name path/to/test.py --help

By default ooniprobe will not include personal identifying information in the test result, nor create a pcap file. This behavior can be personalized by editing your ooniprobe.conf configuration file.