tor-mirrors

tor-mirrors@lists.torproject.org

November 2018

4 participants
2 discussions

Mirror of bridges.torproject.org
by Vasilis 09 Nov '18

09 Nov '18

Hello, The network that I'm using is blocking access to bridges.torproject.org thus I cannot access the bridges website. Looking for another mirror didn't yield any result and using search engines caches didn't work either (got weird HTTP errors). I know that you can send an email and receive an email response back with a list of bridges but you need to send and email and from a specific email address. I suppose many people (as I would) will find a bridges website very useful and I was thinking to run a mirror of bridges.torproject.org . Given that this is acceptable what are the requirements for creating and managing a bridges.torproject.org mirror? Are there any instructions for setting up such a mirror? I did a search on the tor-mirrors list archive but couldn't find any relevant information and the documentation of 'Running a mirror' [1] (seems) to only provide information on how to setup a mirror of the torproject.org website. Thanks! [1] https://www.torproject.org/docs/running-a-mirror.html.en Cheers, ~Vasilis -- Fingerprint: 8FD5 CF5F 39FC 03EB B382 7470 5FBF 70B1 D126 0162 Pubkey: https://pgp.mit.edu/pks/lookup?op=get&search=0x5FBF70B1D1260162

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Usefullness of providing TOR mirrors?
by Niklas Edmundsson 06 Nov '18

06 Nov '18

Hi! I'm one of the mirror admins for ftp.acc.umu.se. It's nice that the tor mirroring effort is seeing some attention from the project, but I'm still curious on what the plan/purpose/goal with the mirroring effort is from an end-user perspective. Bear in mind that I'm mostly accustomed to "regular" open source projects and not fully updated on all the issues with a privacy-oriented project such as TOR. However, I see issues with the usefulness of providing a TOR mirror. One of the prime motivations for us to provide a mirror is the benefit for users in our local region, and this is especially true for other mirrors in bandwidth-starved regions. If there is more bandwidth consumption by mirroring a project than there are downloads it's kind of hard to motivate a mirror in the first place. >From what I have gathered it's today almost impossible for an end user to find and use a mirror... 1) https://www.torproject.org/ -> Download brings you to https://www.torproject.org/download/download-easy.html.en which seems hard-coded to download from dist.torproject.org ... No mirror usage there. 2) There is no list of alternative/mirror download locations. I can google my way to https://www.torproject.org/getinvolved/mirrors.html.en but that's not updated with the latest mirrors nor sorted in a user-friendly manner (you want the list by country/region). 3) The TOR project itself doesn't seem to have much interest in actually using its mirrors. For example https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/27586 discards using mirrorbits with "not needed at the moment", when the exact opposite is true. We mirror admins WANT the traffic, and the TOR project NEEDS something to enable that together with automatically monitoring/disabling broken mirrors for a useful end-user experience. 4) And finally, if all above is catered for, there is the question on how to do download mirror redirect/selection in a clear yet useful manner for the end user. Should the user always be presented with a list of mirrors to choose from? Should that be generated on the server side or in-browser from a list of current mirrors (ie. json output from mirrorbits or similar)? We are heading into privacy concerns here, but it needs to be addressed in a better way than just assuming that the three magic hosts serving dist.torproject.org is the best choice for a particular end-user... /Nikke -- -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Niklas Edmundsson, Admin @ {acc,hpc2n}.umu.se | nikke(a)acc.umu.se --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Beam me up, there's no intelligent life here! =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

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