tor-relays January 2017

tor-relays@lists.torproject.org

79 participants
62 discussions

Entry relay still the same after months?weeks/
by je suis 15 Jan '17

15 Jan '17

Hello everyone And my apologies if this turns out to be a simple, obvious answer, but ever since two(?) upgrades back, my entry relay never changed. I manually deleted Browser/TorBrowser/Data/Tor/state and only then it changed. As of the last delete, it never changed, not with "New identity" or with "New Tor circuit for this site". Is this an intended behaviour? Thank you in advance, Vlad

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torworld relays in entry and exit position
by nusenu 14 Jan '17

14 Jan '17

Hi torworld, thanks for joining the tor network with your relays! You are operating entry and exit relays without proper 'MyFamily' configuration, this can be dangerous for tor clients because they might choose you as entry _and_ exit relay, please help protect tor clients by properly specifying the MyFamily configuration in your torrc files. If you need any help please let us know. https://www.torworld.org/ https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ornetstats/stats/master/o/potentially_dan… https://lists.riseup.net/www/arc/ornetradar/2016-10/msg00101.html kind regards, nusenu https://github.com/nusenu/ansible-relayor

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Exit filtering Necto3 93.115.95.204
by Geoff Down 14 Jan '17

14 Jan '17

Would the operator of the above mentioned exit please remove OpenDNS 'Malicious URL' filtering. Thanks, GD (PS having a .onion contact address doesn't work, I think....) -- http://www.fastmail.com - Same, same, but different...

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All I want for Chrismas is a bloody t-shirt
by I 11 Jan '17

11 Jan '17

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Re: [tor-relays] How can we trust the guards?
by Rana 11 Jan '17

11 Jan '17

@Aeris I do not see how Sybil attacks relate to my question. The adversary will simply set up new nodes, without messing with attacking identities of existing ones. As to the rest of it, let us calculate. Assuming that the adversary wants to control 4000 nodes for 3 years, the 70d startup period is irrelevant and negligible. Assuming further that operating the relays will cost the adversary $20/month each, the total "investment" required would be 20x12x3x4000=less than $3million That’s $1million a year to control most of the Tor nodes., You call this "costly"? This amount is a joke, a trifle, petty cash for any US or Russian government agency. FIFTY times this amount is STILL petty cash, so in case you think $20/month is not enough to run a relay, make it $1000 a month. So I repeat - how is this prevented?

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Re: [tor-relays] What's a "useful" relay?
by Rana 11 Jan '17

11 Jan '17

@Ivan >Some best practices definitely would be awesome to have about running on common (embedded) hardware. Clear notification like "your Commodore 64 is to slow to be a good relay" would also be useful. I agree about the need for guidelines but I disagree about the content of the guidelines that are needed. The data I see so far, including your report of a Pi with 7000 connections, is a clear indication that minimal hardware capabilities are NOT the guidelines that are needed (unless a relay with 7000 connections is still considered "harmful" or "useless"). My own Pi-based relay https://atlas.torproject.org/#details/707A9A3358E0D8653089AF32A097570A96400… has just reached 1300 connections; CPU utilization: practically zero; memory utilization: 14.5%. The increase from 500 to 1300 connections required memory utilization increase of just 2%, from 12.5% to 14.5%. Clearly, hardware of the $35 Pi has absolutely nothing to do with residential relays being useful or not, save the (recently reported here) anomaly of an operator who has symmetric BW of 160 mbps to the home. So guidelines on hardware are evidently not needed for "normal" residential ISP bandwidth: it has been amply demonstrated that even a dirt cheap Pi is not the bottleneck, no need to spend further effort on this until the REAL bottleneck is resolved: the network. To continue the story, the above relay of mine with 1300 connections has consensus BW rating of 38 (thirty eight). Why? Who knows. I get zero feedback on the reason for this. To further continue the story, my 2nd relay https://atlas.torproject.org/#details/31B8C4C4F1C78F923BD906769297B15A428C4… that currently has about the same Atlas-measured BW as the first relay (132 vs 153 KB/s) and is based on exactly the same hardware and software, is clinically dead with almost no connections and BW rating of 13. Why? Who knows. What is needed is a standardized feedback on WHY the relay has such a low rating. This could cause at least part of the operators to take care of the bottleneck (eg moving the relay to another location, or abandoning the home relay and replacing it with a hosted one). And if the home relay is indeed as harmful as some people here think, the recommendation should be issued to shut it down, instead of leaving it hanging there doing nothing or even harming Tor. Such feedback could significantly improve the quality and effectiveness of Tor. Based on the discussion here, the people who run Dirauths and bwauths know very well (or at least can easily find out) the reasons for relays getting low rating - why not automate the communication of the reasons to relay operators in clear, unequivocal and actionable terms? I get the feeling that people are trying to be "politically correct" here and it's a pity (although they DO respond fully and frankly when asked a direct question). Rana

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Disparity between download and upload traffic
by Gage Parrott 10 Jan '17

10 Jan '17

Morning, everyone, I recently migrated my bridge relay over to a VM and everything seems to be working fine except for one oddity. I consistently see lines like this in tor's log file on the new machine: Dec 25 23:48:14.000 [notice] Heartbeat: Tor's uptime is 4 days 5:59 hours, with 43 circuits open. I've sent 1.78 GB and received 28.37 GB. Dec 25 23:48:14.000 [notice] Heartbeat: In the last 6 hours, I have seen 2 unique clients. Dec 26 05:48:14.000 [notice] Heartbeat: Tor's uptime is 4 days 11:59 hours, with 105 circuits open. I've sent 1.87 GB and received 29.24 GB. Dec 26 05:48:14.000 [notice] Heartbeat: In the last 6 hours, I have seen 2 unique clients. Notice the amount of data sent and received. Can anyone think of why there would be such a large discrepancy between the amount of traffic downloaded versus uploaded? This behavior persists after reboots, as well. I thought maybe it was downloading a ton of directory data, but is there really a GB's worth of directory data to download every six hours?? Also, the logs on my old machine (pre-migration, one line pasted below for reference) indicated that nearly the same amount of data was being sent as was being received. Any ideas on why would this have changed? Dec 07 06:02:03.000 [notice] Heartbeat: Tor's uptime is 4 days 6:12 hours, with 78 circuits open. I've sent 33.71 GB and received 33.47 GB. Any help is greatly appreciated. Thanks a bunch and merry Christmas! gp

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Re: [tor-relays] Call for Tor Fallback Directories
by l3thal 10 Jan '17

10 Jan '17

please add my relays as fallback mirrors, thanks On Dec 4, 2016 5:45 AM, "teor" <teor2345(a)gmail.com> wrote: -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA512 Dear Tor Relay Operator, Your relay(s) can help tor clients find the tor network by becoming a fallback directory mirror.[0] These mirrors are hard-coded into tor's source code, like the directory authorities. We have 80 fallbacks, but we want 200 for the next release. Fallbacks need to have: - - the same IP address(es) and ports for the next 2 years, - - the same relay identity key for the next 2 years, - - good uptime (at least 95%), and - - good bandwidth and network connectivity (we estimate an extra 25GB per month). Please email me to add your relays that fit these criteria to the list. If you are BCC'd on this email, it looks like you have at least one relay that could become a fallback. You can also email me if you know your relay will be changing address or key, and I'll make sure we don't choose it. We are keeping the fallback lists from the last release[1][2]. So if you have emailed me before about becoming a fallback, there is no need to email again. But please let me know if your relay details have changed. (I did not BCC relay operators who are already on the fallback lists, unless their relay details changed.) In a week or two, I will run a script to select the hard-coded list for the release. If you're interested, here's some background to this request: The latest list[3] and log[4] of candidates was generated using the instructions in [5] from scripts/maint/updateFallbackDirs.py on my GitHub branch[6]. (This branch has some bug fixes compared to what's in master.) We're tracking this work in [7]. [0]: https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/doc/ FallbackDirectoryMirrors [1]: https://github.com/teor2345/tor/blob/fallbacks-029-v2/ scripts/maint/fallback.whitelist [2]: https://github.com/teor2345/tor/blob/fallbacks-029-v2/ scripts/maint/fallback.blacklist [3]: https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/attachment/ ticket/18828/potential_extra_fallbacks_2016-12-04 [4]: https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/attachment/ ticket/18828/potential_extra_fallbacks_2016-12-04.log [5]: https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/doc/ UpdatingFallbackDirectoryMirrors [6]: https://github.com/teor2345/tor/blob/fallbacks-029-v2/scripts/maint/ updateFallbackDirs.py [7]: https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/18828 T - -- Tim Wilson-Brown (teor) teor2345 at gmail dot com PGP C855 6CED 5D90 A0C5 29F6 4D43 450C BA7F 968F 094B ricochet:ekmygaiu4rzgsk6n xmpp: teor at torproject dot org - ------------------------------------------------------------------------ -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Comment: GPGTools - https://gpgtools.org iQIcBAEBCgAGBQJYQ+laAAoJEEUMun+WjwlLXd8QAMVKWrGW+N5ij5/1k1AEDQpC qMK3C3stukeuHYqLEU3GnhJFU/CWMp+iThRNueC5I96MEpcioJDQaCDK6aGEvTY3 efPnYwOJcgE7v4up+JSFWUlO4HcF5Fu5cSVl710JjRiHuZAyLOQw0rWEMzfp0OQp sZLgijbtCUCcels7IS+bE89y4KKQvLu5lz+H7cPIcsx4TJ4QHd5LbWuvtNIHE2lW zA3LlrYsO4vtrFs/0kBWku1u7l1ZhD0Un/lwY7JWaxGmwm9C6kJDFwBFCGYRlakF VLfsoVSgcdjQPkZV9jeL0X+9Wn9L6zZ5JNhM5lhYYpGVD+Rl/apPfhxHI5aOTsGe WRcDjxvgUdMD//xnk2XTmnzKCNUNMyUKGSL8Y7Fadp7+dLLkWlovEp6iOnyAffh1 ZnrV7dhRgH3NcgACDpQ2rAqVzUnhdn1//bcD1MlXjObxvZD1Io1zp7CDQHnG6IaG ydc+3qoqUoII0JQFxrRCFi2cH/E8+3x0+7fC0g91irdGG+Pcosf7IFPJvFsdilCg rN4n6Ohmm1L3KQVWLG7TcvEAcjIeyMurhCvK042Q/X7HYenVS3wVxawd8dnb/rOl 0ItMUsXBKgLVcZXhzUTOB+pNaX8aFj1sJnCB2LRDT8s8a2+zESufNxjgGYZ3Nduk FziDqhHJs7MXyX0HPJPH =omox -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- _______________________________________________ tor-relays mailing list tor-relays(a)lists.torproject.org https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-relays

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Running a relay with low transfer limits
by ike 09 Jan '17

09 Jan '17

Hi folks, Is there a generally accepted recommendation for how to set up a relay on a server with a fast connection but limited monthly transfers, say less than 100GB each way per month? Having done a bit of reading it seems daily limits are the way to go but I've found contradictory information regarding also limiting the bandwidth. Should I keep the relay accepting traffic (albeit slowly) for most of the day, allow a fast connection but for a very limited period every 24 hours or something in between. Thanks, Ike

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Some thoughts from a tor bridge op
by a tor op 08 Jan '17

08 Jan '17

Hi I am a TOR bridge operator running a bridge with 8 Mbps advertised BW and having obfs4 installed. Been up a year or so on this install. I'll put a few misc thoughts out here, only been lurking on list earlier. I have been thinking a little about how useful this system is (MY bridge that is), in part since I haven't seen so much traffic lately. The latest few months I have seen some 1-4 (concurrent?) users according to Atlas whereas I had up to 10 during a year ago. There is also a count in tor log abut how many clients that have been seen in the latest hours etc. I then had a drop til nil due to not being updated when Lucky removed his Bridge Authority I think, or related to some other more or less related technical issue. What is a normal figure on this, anybody know? The thing is, in tor log it is reported that all is fine and that connectivity is ok. In Atlas these flags are reported: Fast Guard HSDir Running Stable V2Dir However, I have been thinking about a few other issues too though. One is, I noted that my provider gives this particular VPS a private IP address and traffic is NATed to the VPS according to info in the control panel. I do see a few GBs being pushed every other day so I guess things are kind of working, though. Is there something I may need to edit in config? Specifically the "OR Adresses" being mentioned on Atlas page contains a port that is not opened in local FW on server. Still it works and gets some client traffic(?) In torrc I some time earlier put in "ExtORPort auto" and also another port that is opened in FW using "ORPort". I also have the "ServerTransportListenAddr obfs4" with "0.0.0.0" and yet another port that is not being opened in FW, in the file. There are a few technicalities that might need some clearer explanation in manual/man/how-to I think. One thing I am thinking of is whether this private address and NATting issue makes the system not perform as I intend (although I do see some traffic as mentioned). Just a few thoughts. Any comments appreciated. A TOR bridge op

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tor-relays January 2017