- tor-relays - lists.torproject.org

Spam
by kingqueen 29 Jun '14

29 Jun '14

hi, well having run a relay for just under 2 weeks, I've got my first spam on this email address. As you will no doubt have guessed, this is not my usual email address, it is only used for the Tor relay contact details, this email list and a very few other projects that will not have published my email address anywhere. So I guess that this spam is as a result of my email address appearing on Atlas or Globe or similar as a result of it being the contact address for my Tor relay. I know this possibility is mentioned in the Tor documentation; I read it somewhere. I guess there's not much to be done about it; I wouldn't want to remove contact details - the address is already in the public domain anyway, and I want to be contactable with any problems. I guess I just have to use the standard spam filtering and combating measures. Could those with experience of running a relay for longer, please advise if this will become a major problem? Will spam increase substantially? Also, any suggestions very gratefully received. Thank you! KQ --- This email is free from viruses and malware because avast! Antivirus protection is active. http://www.avast.com

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Circuit purposes
by Joel Cretan 29 Jun '14

29 Jun '14

I'm running a relay that I do not intend to use for anything else, so I set SocksPort to 0. I usually have two or three circuits established anyway, though, so I guess I haven't managed to disable creating those. I'm not sure what they are for. They are always labeled "Purpose: Ags=is_internal,need_capacity,". Several of them seem to get created around the same time, stay open for a while, and then get closed around the same time. I see some other circuit purposes documented here: https://stem.torproject.org/api/control.html But that documentation indicates that "Tor may provide purposes not in this enum", which is the case here. What are these circuits for, and do I need them? Here's my torrc: http://pastebin.com/fuQv8B2m Here's my ifconfig output: http://pastebin.com/mxMkhbMj I'm running tor 0.2.4.22 compiled from source (did not specify any options on make) on raspbian wheezy June 2014 with kernel version 3.12.20+. Thanks, Joel

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Directory Server and bandwidth accounting
by Kali Tor 28 Jun '14

28 Jun '14

Hi, Is my understanding correct that if I set AccountingMax, the relay will never be used as a DR? It kind of feels odd because in my situation I can donate 500GB (and maybe even more) but I do want to keep a max limit and at the same time let the relay be a DR as well. Any way to achieve this? -kali-

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BBC iPlayer blocked for UK middle relay operators?
by Chris Whittleston 28 Jun '14

28 Jun '14

Is anyone else running a relay in the UK having issues accessing BBC iPlayer from the same connection? For the last 6 weeks or so now I've been getting messages telling me I'm 'outside the UK' when I'm in London, and my IP address clearly resolves to show that. Just wondering if the provider BBC use for iPlayer might have started just blocking all Tor IPs recently - including middle relays. Chris

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Bridge still advertising removed pluggable transport?
by Rick Huebner 28 Jun '14

28 Jun '14

Hi. I removed the recently-deprecated obfs2 transport from my (0.2.4.22) bridge's torrc, but after restarting, it seems to still be advertising support for it. It correctly doesn't appear as a "Registered server transport obfs2" line in the tor log file, and it's not listed in the TOR_PT_SERVER_TRANSPORTS or TOR_PT_SERVER_BINDADDR env vars fed to obfsproxy, nor is obfsproxy listening at the port that was formerly used for obfs2 any more. But... it's still listed in a "TransportProxy obfs2" line in the tor state file after several hours, and is still showing up as a supported transport in my bridge's details page on globe.torproject.org. It seems like that would mean it's still being handed out as a working bridge by BridgeDB for those requesting obfs2 bridges, though that port and transport will never be up again. And it might trigger mistaken "bridge is down" or "destination is censored" signals from those attempting to monitor such things. Is there something else I need to do besides dropping obfs2 from the torrc ServerTransportPlugin line, or is this just a bug? If so, it'll be showing up a lot more as obfs2 is phased out. Thanks.

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Bridge clients don't *really* update dynamic bridge IPs from fingerprints?
by Rick Huebner 28 Jun '14

28 Jun '14

I run a bridge from a "semi-static" home internet account, where the address is dynamically assigned but only changes when either the ISP or my hardware router goes down and forces a reconnect, which only happens maybe once every several months. I've read in a few places that Tor bridges with dynamic IP addresses are just as useful as those with static addresses, even if their address changes pretty often, because the bridge user's client will use the bridge's fingerprint to look up its current address and port from the bridge authority if it fails to connect. How certain are we that this is actually happening? It's not the behavior I'm seeing here. My IP address has changed maybe 3 times in the last year, once for an ISP outage after a storm, and for a couple of hardware router firmware updates on my end. In each case, my bridge's traffic plummeted back to essentially nil, with a long slow regrowth over several weeks (or months!) as the new address slowly propagated around to a new set of users. I like to monitor the "Who has used my bridge?" status from Vidalia, and I get a real heartwarming glow when I see places like Syria and Iran showing up regularly. I've had a nice steady clientele keeping my bridge pretty busy for the past few months, and then yesterday I needed to do a firmware update, and *pfft* all my clients are gone again and I'm back to square one. Sigh. What's worse, I then picture that hypothetical Syrian civil rights dissident who's come to rely on my bridge always being there, suddenly being stranded without a connection and needing to scramble to find another one. Unnecessarily, as I was back up in minutes, just with a new address. It's pretty clear that the mechanism for clients to refresh their bridge's addresses is there, but I'm doubting that it's actually working right. I can think of two main failure modes: either the fingerprint isn't being distributed (or entered), leaving the user with just the current IP address and port with no way to query the bridge authority for an update. Or it's being entered, but not actually used by the client. For the first, BridgeDB does distribute the fingerprints, but I note that the docs/bridges.html.en page mentions that it's optional, but then doesn't say anything about what it's good for or why you should include it, so I wonder if many users just don't bother, especially if they need to query BridgeDB from a different PC than they run their own copy of TBB on and can't easily copy & paste the whole thing. Also, it seems the email responder channel doesn't even give out the fingerprints at all, leaving all those users automatically without updates. I don't know the distribution split between BridgeDB site queries and email queries, so it's hard to guess the impact of that lack, but it seems like something that could be easily fixed regardless. Probably more critical though, is the second option. Why would the fingerprint not be used if it was entered? Maybe some key option got disabled somehow? If I'm reading the torrc manual right, there's an option called UpdateBridgesFromAuthority that controls exactly this behavior... and it defaults to off. And to see how it ends up being set in the actual TBB, I installed that and checked its torrc, and it's not in there either, so apparently it stays disabled. "Well, there's your problem..." So am I missing something, or has this feature somehow fallen through the cracks and ended up accidentally disabled for the vast majority of all bridge users? It seems like this must be having a pretty serious impact on overall bridge usage, as I was under the impression that a big percentage of bridges are run off of dynamic address accounts, and many of those will be changing addresses more often than mine, maybe as frequently as daily in the worst cases. And every time they do, they lose their entire clientele and have to restart the long, slow ramp up to a new user base again from scratch. This kind of forced, pointless churn can't possibly be good for the network. How many bridge operators are we losing every year because they never see significant traffic due to changing IP addresses too often? And if they ask about it, they're just told, "Sure, dynamic IP is fine, just be patient and they will come." And what's the impact on the bridge users of having their bridge connections going bad so much more often than they should? I think simply getting a bridge address might be a risk exposure for many of these people, and making them do it more often could be dangerous for them. Or maybe I'm just totally misreading this, and my own experiences of losing all my bridge clients on each change aren't typical, but are due to some other unknown singular issue. How about you other bridge providers, how many of you are on dynamic IP addresses, and have you noticed a similar huge drop in traffic after a change, or does your traffic seem to snap back pretty quickly as it should?

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running Tor relay live with AddressSanitizer
by starlight.2013q4＠binnacle.cx 28 Jun '14

28 Jun '14

Has anyone tried running a live relay with an image built using GCC 4.8 and -fsanitize=address? AddressSanitizer documentation says it should be no worse than about x4 on CPU and typically about x2, so it looks reasonable to try. I'm seeing peak CPU of about 7-8% of a 2.2GHz AMD core. I'd probably create a static build, with 'libevent' and 'tor' compiled using -fsanitize=address -O1 -fno-omit-frame-pointer -g per the Google documentation and 'libz' compiled normally since 'zlib' is stable and mature. Any thoughts or experience? Thanks

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bitcoin adopt a node idea
by jason＠icetor.is 27 Jun '14

27 Jun '14

This seems pretty damn similiar to something we should be offering for Tor relays, possibly even exits and bridges (if they only run for a month at a time). Possibly co-ordinated through the EFF? http://www.coindesk.com/adopt-node-project-aims-bolster-bitcoin-network-sec… -Jason

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Is my tor exit relay set up correctly?
by Sander Bongers 26 Jun '14

26 Jun '14

Hi, A few weeks ago I setup a tor exit relay, using this documentation: https://www.torproject.org/docs/tor-relay-debian.html.en I have somewhat experience, so I kinda knew what I was doing, and I got the message "Self-testing indicates your ORPort is reachable from the outside. Excellent." in the log file. But my server doesn't seem to appear in any tor relay lists such as https://globe.torproject.org, even after a few weeks. What could I have done wrong?

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Re: [tor-relays] [tor-relay] Spam
by tor＠t-3.net 26 Jun '14

26 Jun '14

The spam to my own Tor relay operator email address (same one as in this list) isn't meaningful in volume. I haven't seen any amounts that a delete key couldn't easily handle. In my experience, you should be careful with spam filtering, as you could end up dumping abuse complaints that you wanted to see and maybe respond to, or have legitimate relay list email not come through. I ended up having to whitelist some stuff for this list to work right because of automatic spam behavior of this mail service. It's not like the sight of spam email in your tor relay box is toxic to your workstation. It's usually obvious from the subject what it is, and that it can be safely and immediately deleted.

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