Dolda Connect FAQ

Questions about Dolda Connect are not extremely common to begin with, but there are a few that I have been asked more than once. This page is intended to repeat the answers to them, and will grow as I hear other questions more than once. If you have some question not yet covered here, please feel free to mail me about it – my address is both at the bottom of this page and scattered around the source tree.

Some hub requires me to enter a password and/or use a nickname other than my default. How do I supply it?

I'm assuming that you are using the dolcon GUI program. On the "Hub connections" tab, there is the "Address" text field that is normally used when connecting to hubs (you may have noticed that when you double-click on a hub in the public hub list to connect to it, its address is filled into that text field before connecting). In that field, enter the hub address as you normally would (for example, by clicking only once on a hub in the list, or by entering it manually), and then add the password and/or nickname after the address, like this:

hub1.somenet.org:411 nick Cooldude password s3cr3t

If you password includes spaces, you need to quote it with double quotes, like this:

dc.someother.net:555 nick Awesomedude password "Very Secret"

How can I automatically connect to some hubs when the daemon starts?

The daemon will not do such a thing by itself (and, by design, it never will). However, thanks to the extensibility of Dolda Connect, there comes a Guile script with it, called hubmgr in the lib/guile directory, that will do that. It also takes an extra step and keeps running to reconnect any of the listed hubs, should it ever disconnect. To make it work, you need to:

1. Compile Dolda Connect with Guile support. Do that by passing the --with-guile argument to the configure script.
2. Create a configuration file for hubmgr, called ~/.hublist.
3. Run hubmgr. Note that it should run not as root, but as the user you would normally log in as.

The configuration file lists the hub addresses, one per line, prefixed with the protocol to use – i.e. dc (When ADC is finally implemented, it too will be available). An example may look like this:

dc hub1.somenet.org:411
dc dc.someother.net:555 nick Cooldude password s3cr3t

Note that the port number always has to be specified.

Please see the manpage hubmgr(1) for more details and examples.

Is the protocol between the clients and the daemon documented?

Not yet, unfortunately. However, since I have actually been asked this question more than once, I am working on it. There is some initial work done in the "protodoc" branch in the Git repository, if you would like to check it out.

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