Named Data Networking (NDN) is a potential future Internet architecture designed as a distribution network. To access the NDN network from a Linux or Apple OSX machine, one can install the NDN Platform, a collection of software packages including the protocol stack and critical applications. The NDN Forwarding Daemon (NFD), a core component of the architecture, serves as a software router and runs both on the network routers as well as on end hosts to communicate with routers.

The NDN team provides periodic releases of the new platform, and binary packages are provided with each platform release. However, the development of NDN software, including NFD, happens much faster than platform releases, so users can download source code from GitHub. If a user wants to run bleeding edge software, those packages must be built from source code.

As a geeky low end box user, I’m thinking: can I run the NDN platform on a Linux box with only a small amount of memory? The box I’m talking about is an OpenVZ container from LowEndSpirit UK location, with only 128MB memory and no swap space. To make the challenge more interesting, I want to avoid apt-get, and run the bleeding edge version built from source code.
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