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
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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
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Niklas Edmundsson, Admin @ {acc,hpc2n}.umu.se | nikke(a)acc.umu.se
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Beam me up, there's no intelligent life here!
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