- tor-relays - lists.torproject.org

Good hosting location for exit relay
by DerTor Steher 25 Sep '14

25 Sep '14

Hey, for a few days now I'm looking for an appropriate ISP for my new exit relay. There are a few problem I am facing now: 1.) Since I'm living in germany it isn't the very best to host an exit relay in germany, so I need to know which country is (law related) the best country I could host my VPS. 2.) The choice of a hoster. It's not easy to find a good and reliable and (if possible) cheap hoster which allows tor exit relays so I need to crawl to whole Good/Bad ISPs list for such providers. If I had the cash I would rent a server at Cyberbunker but it's to expensive to only run a relay there. I would appreciate if you could help me or at least give me some tips with finding the best country and provider. Thanks. :)

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Re: [tor-relays] Call for a big fast bridge (to be the meek backend)
by David Fifield 25 Sep '14

25 Sep '14

On Mon, Sep 15, 2014 at 07:12:23PM -0700, David Fifield wrote: > The meek pluggable transport is currently running on the bridge I run, > which also happens to be the backend bridge for flash proxy. I'd like to > move it to a fast relay run by an experienced operator. I want to do > this both to diffuse trust, so that I don't run all the infrastructure, > and because my bridge is not especially fast and I'm not especially > adept at performance tuning. > > All you will need to do is run the meek-server program, add some lines > to your torrc, and update the software when I ask you to. The more CPU, > memory, and bandwidth you have, the better, though at this point usage > is low enough that you won't even notice it if you are already running a > fast relay. I think it will help if your bridge is located in the U.S., > because that reduces latency from Google App Engine. > > The meek-server plugin is basically just a little web server: > https://gitweb.torproject.org/pluggable-transports/meek.git/tree/HEAD:/meek… A couple of other requirements have shown themselves in helping set up a meek-server relay. The first is that it has to be a 0.2.5.x version of tor. This is so that the ExtORPort option will be supported. The ExtORPort option is needed in order to collect statistics on pluggable transports (see #4773). One of the lines you will have to add to torrc is: ExtORPort auto If your tor does not support the option, you will see in the log: [warn] Failed to parse/validate config: Unknown option 'ExtORPort'. Failing. The second requirement is that the relay needs to have either BridgeRelay or DirPort set. If neither of these options is set, the relay will not be a directory cache, and clients will not be able to bootstrap past "20%: Asking for networkstatus consensus." As I understand it, #12538 will make it so that every relay is a directory cache, but it is not committed yet. I'll check back privately with the people who offered to run a relay and check if setting these options is okay. David Fifield

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Help collect hidden service usage stats?
by Roger Dingledine 24 Sep '14

24 Sep '14

Hi folks, If you are comfortable compiling Tor from git, and you want to help investigate what fraction of Tor network load comes from hidden service use, I have a shiny new git branch called hs-stats that will collect per-thirty-minute statistics about number of circuits and number of cells your relay sees that have to do with exiting, with hidden services, with circuits where you're not the final hop, and a fourth none-of-the-above category. https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/13192 It skips all circuits and cells that come from non-relays, which should help make sure the stats aren't useful for hurting anonymity. It doesn't automatically send the output anywhere -- it just writes it to its notice-level log for now. So you'll need to either send me the log lines, or add them to the trac ticket like I did here: https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/13192#comment:2 Preliminary results are that load from hidden services is actually a tiny fraction of overall load. A bonus use from these statistics would be to learn what fraction of load comes from exit connections vs middle connections, for relays with various consensus flags. And of course, it's possible there are bugs in how I'm doing the counting. I'll keep investigating to make sure I'm doing it right. Thanks! --Roger

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How about a TWN entry about hosting locations?
by Jens Kubieziel 24 Sep '14

24 Sep '14

Hi, it seems quite much work for a person to collect information about hosting locations. So what do you think about putting a section into next TWN which links to a wiki page where everyone can share information about costs in different regions? -- Jens Kubieziel http://www.kubieziel.de Es genügt nicht, keine Gedanken zu haben. Man muß auch unfähig sein, sie auszudrücken. Karl Kraus

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Alternative Nobel Prize
by Sebastian Urbach 24 Sep '14

24 Sep '14

Hi, The german magazine "der Spiegel" reports that Edward Snowden will receive the Alternative Nobel Prize. Congratulations Edward ! -- Mit freundlichen Grüssen / Sincerely yours Sebastian Urbach ----------------------------------------- Definition of TOR: 10% luck, 20% skill, 15% concentrated power of will, 5% pleasure, 50% pain and 100% reason to remember the name! -----------------------------------------

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A friendly reminder for all ScrambleSuit bridge operators.
by Yawning Angel 24 Sep '14

24 Sep '14

Hello all, This is a friendly reminder to all ScrambleSuit bridge operators that unless you are running tor-0.2.5.x, you should not be running a ScrambleSuit bridge. This is because the method for propagating the ScrambleSuit password (or any other future pluggable transport server side argument) for inclusion in the Bridge line served from BridgeDB was implemented in 0.2.5.x, and is not present in 0.2.4.x, and to make matters worse, 0.2.4.x has a bug that will allow this configuration to run instead of failing with an error[0]. If you are running a ScrambleSuit bridge with tor-0.2.4.x, it is useless. Users that happen to be served your ScrambleSuit bridge will not be able to connect, because the password is missing. Approximately 1/7th of the ScrambleSuit bridges in BridgeDB exhibit this behavior and we will most likely start filtering them on the BridgeDB side. Please see https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/13202 if you wish to know more about this. Best Regards, -- Yawning Angel [0]: Apparently this is not worth patching 0.2.4.x for, which I personally view as unfortunate.

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Re: [tor-relays] Estimating the value and cost of the Tor network
by Tim 24 Sep '14

24 Sep '14

On 24 Sep 2014, at 13:38 , tor-relays-request(a)lists.torproject.org wrote: > Date: Wed, 24 Sep 2014 05:40:00 +0200 > From: Moritz Bartl <moritz(a)torservers.net> > To: tor-relays(a)lists.torproject.org > Subject: Re: [tor-relays] Estimating the value and cost of the Tor > network > > Hi, > > Prices vary widely across different countries. We pay between $400 and > $1500 per Gbit/s per month in "popular and cheap locations". In a > scenario where we want to grow the network and at least keep the current > geographical diversity (or even grow it), we'd have to at least equally > strengthen less fortunate locations. > > The list of the top 20 countries [0] contains countries such as Russia, > Poland, Norway and Hungary, where international bandwidth is quite > expensive. Hopefully someone from this list can help us compile or find > estimates for pricing per country. It would be interesting to learn the > prices even for mid-size (~50-100Mbit/s+) relays in any country outside > of the top five countries, even more so for crazy places that don't make > the top 20. > > Another factor that we should not ignore is that, while it may be > possible to find a set of ISPs that allow mid-size exit relays, it gets > harder the more traffic you push, because of the additional workload > (and scariness) for the ISP from complaints. > > [0] https://compass.torproject.org/ > > -- > Moritz Bartl > https://www.torservers.net/ Mike, Moritz, Re: crazy places that don't make the top 20 I've noticed that most of the Tor network is concentrated in the northern hemisphere, particularly Europe and North America. I assume the distribution of authorities is similar. Apart from China, no Asia-Pacific country makes the top 20 in Tor compass.[1] And no southern hemisphere country makes the top 20 at all. The first Asia-Pacific countries after China are Japan at #29, then Singapore at #37. And unless I've missed something, the first southern hemisphere country is Australia at #42. Details aside, I'd love to see more routers and exits in countries other than the top 4 (Germany, France, Netherlands, United States). This helps spread failure risk, sovereign risk, and the risk from 3 letter agencies and the like. And it would make Tor faster for those in the southern hemisphere, Africa, and the Asia-pacific. But I don't know how much hope there is for this - I've tried to find pricing in Australia, and the figures I've found are: $8000 per month for 100Mbps.[2] $1500 per month for 25Mbps.[3] $800 per month for 10Mbps.[4] That seems ridiculously pricey… I'd rather wait for the National Broadband Network and run one on 100Mbps fibre at 1% of the price.[5] (Except bandwidth would not be guaranteed on a "home"-style plan.) Time to find a sympathetic university? Tim [1]: https://compass.torproject.org/?family=&ases=&exits=all_relays&by_country=T… [2]: http://www.intervolve.com.au/datacentre/ [3]: http://www.exetel.com.au/corporate/ip-transit-colocation [4]: https://www.xhostsolutions.com.au/services/dedicated-server-unmetered.cfm [5]: http://delimiter.com.au/2014/04/03/unlimited-100mbps-89-99-tpg-equals-top-n…

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Good/Bad ISPs
by obx 23 Sep '14

23 Sep '14

I've updated the list of good/bad ISPs. It shows relay [ ] exit [ ] in front of every good ISP. Please verify that information is accurate. Special information, like anonymous hosting, would be appreciated. Thanks

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printfection - tor shop
by Sebastian Urbach 23 Sep '14

23 Sep '14

Hi, Is it just temporary or is the tor-shop at printfection permanently deactivated ? -- Mit freundlichen Grüssen / Sincerely yours Sebastian Urbach ----------------------------------------- Definition of TOR: 10% luck, 20% skill, 15% concentrated power of will, 5% pleasure, 50% pain and 100% reason to remember the name! -----------------------------------------

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Correctly setting up arm
by Chris Whittleston 23 Sep '14

23 Sep '14

Dear all, Previously, I've run arm using 'sudo -u debian-tor arm'. As was mentioned here previously, this is not how you should run it - in fact there is a bit of documentation to suggest how it should be done. Unfortunately I'm having some issues getting arm working correctly as described here in step 14: https://www.torproject.org/docs/tor-relay-debian.html.en#after Having added my user (pi) to the debian-tor group, I try to run 'arm' and get the following: Failed to read authentication cookie (permission denied): /var/run/tor/control.authcookie I've tried reinstalling arm, relogged and checked that I'm in the right group still using 'groups' (which I am) - no joy. I've checked my torrc and found the following lines: ## If you enable the controlport, be sure to enable one of these ## authentication methods, to prevent attackers from accessing it. #HashedControlPassword 16:872860B76453A77D60CA2BB8C1A7042072093276A3D701AD684053EC4C #CookieAuthentication 1 CookieAuthentication wasn't initially enabled, turning it on makes no difference, I get the same error. I am able to get it working when setting up HashedControlPassword by generating a has using tor --hash-password <password> and editing torrc accordingly. Am I missing something when it comes to setting up CookieAuthentication? I guess I must be...although it seems strange that I was getting that error even with CookieAuthentication disabled. Any insight appreciated :) Chris -- *Dr Chris Whittleston 栗主* Department of Chemistry University of Cambridge Lensfield Road, Cambridge, CB2 1EW Email: csw34(a)cam.ac.uk Tel: +44 (0)1223 336423

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