What exactly is Exhale?

Exhale is a Freenet client designed to quickly insert websites into the Freenet. By inserting a website into the Freenet using Exhale, the site is available anonymously to anyone with a Freenet node running. Furthermore, the originator of the site (yourself) is also anonymous (in the sense that Freenet is anonymous).

What is the Freenet?

For more information, you should really go to the Freenet homepage. But, long story short, Freenet is an anonymous, distributed, redundant file system that is often used for anonymous publishing. It uses some clever networking designs to achieve its goals. Exhale requires that the user have a Freenet node running or access to a running Freenet node for use.

What is a Content Hash Key (CHK)?

A CHK is a Freenet key that is determined based on file contents. When a file is inserted into the Freenet, the Freenet will return a CHK, which uniquely identifies the inserted file. To retrieve the file from the Freenet, the key is requested, and Freenet returns the content.

Exhale generates CHKs for all files it inserts into the Freenet. If a complete project is being inserted, the CHK of each file is stored in a list for compilation into the Freesite metadata, which brings us to...

What is an Exhale project?

An Exhale project consists of a website designed by the user and stored in a single directory with the appropriate relative pathnames for links. The project information stored by Exhale also consists of a key pair, which is described later, a name, and a project type. Inserting a project inserts every file in the directory using the name and the keypair.

What is a project keypair?

Freesites (Freenet websites) are most often inserted using a Signed Subspace Key (SSK). The beauty of the SSK is that it consists of a public and private key, meaning that anyone can view the freesite, but only the original author can insert it. The SSK consists of the metadata which allows for the HTML pages to link to the proper files. A SSK, when properly used, can allow for freesites that can receive updates, as explained below.

What are one-shot and edition freesites?

One-shot freesites represent freesites that can be inserted exactly once and never be updated. If you wish to generate a static website in Freenet that you never plan to update, a one-shot freesite is for you. You can always reinsert freesites, but this can only be done for the purpose of refreshing the freesite (Freenet eventually removes unpopular content).

Edition freesites represent freesites that may be updated by the author with new content. If you wish to update content, an edition freesite allows the author to insert a new edition of the site. Exhale does not automatically advance the edition number, but this can be easily done in the "Project Options" window.

Freenet also supports Date Based Redirect sites, but Exhale does not support this type of site. DBR sites require that the site be reinserted daily, but Exhale does not contain any sort of automatic scheduling that can ensure reliable DBRs. Other Freenet tools can be used to reliably insert DBR sites.

Why won't Exhale reliably insert big files?

Exhale was designed to insert freesites, which nominally consist of html pages and images. Inserting large files into Freenet involves a bit more work because normally they are split up prior to insertion. These 'splitfiles' can be downloaded very reliably. Exhale, however, does not support the creation and insertion of splitfiles.

Other tools already exist that specialize in the insertion of large files, such as Fuqid. To include a link to a large file on your freesite, it is recommended that you insert the file using Fuqid or an equivalent tool, and paste a link to the key explicitly in your freesite HTML code. Most users will use a tool such as Fuqid to download large files anyway.

This is only a guess at the Exhale frequently asked questions. If you have one and think the answer should be posted here, mail it to exhale@member.fsf.org. No questions will be posted with their author's names.

Why was GTK+ dropped for the GUI?

The port of GTK+ for Windows is not heavily used, except perhaps by the GIMP project.  Some testing appeared to show that GTK+ caused crashes of the main program during updates to the queues.  Further testing may have ironed out the issue, but other problems would have remained on the Windows platform, including sluggish response, non-standard components, and unnecessarily complex dependencies.  The GUI was replaced by a standard Win32 interface that has exhibited considerably more stability and responsiveness, as well as eliminating dependencies and simplifying Exhale's code considerably.  The GTK+ version will be updated to work with Linux, btu official support of Exhale/GTK on Windows has been dropped.