intro

When you run pawb init for the first time, several things happen. pawb will:

• start building a circuit, over which you'll send data later
• create a tunnel, using the same tech that powers VPNs

And then it daemonizes, now that all the stuff that's most likely to fail is done. (If you don't want it to, that's fine, just pass --foreground! That can be useful, if you like seeing the logs or want to keep an eye on its status.)

At this point, any network traffic that isn't specifically trying to circumvent VPNs will be captured by the tunnel and sent through the HexPawb network. If you try to access a normal website -- one not hosted as a furtive service -- then pawb will forward that traffic through relays. If it notices a DNS lookup for a .hexpawb domain -- the marker for furtive services -- then it'll connect doubly-anonymously to it.

While it runs, pawb will:

• keep track of and maintain any existing circuits
• periodically replace circuits with new ones by tearing them down and building replacements
• scale how many circuits are active dynamically as you try to send or receive more data

You can do a few things with pawb while it's running. See the output of pawb help for more information about that; mostly it's small tweaks or status checks. The big stuff is deliberately kept hardcoded in pawb, because otherwise it's far too easy to mess up your security.

Finally, when you're done with HexPawb, you run pawb done, which will:

• destroy the tunnel
• tear down any active circuts