tor-relays

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36 participants
4815 discussions

'service tor start' not using "/etc/tor/torrc"?
by TonyXue 15 Aug '13

15 Aug '13

Hi, Today when I was using htop to check my Tor server. I found that Tor was running as "/usr/sbin/tor --defaults-torrc /usr/share/tor/tor-service-defaults-torrc --hush" which seems Tor is not using the configuration file "/etc/tor/torrc" but the default one instead. So what should I do to let Tor use /etc/tor/torrc? I tried to use "/usr/sbin/tor -f /etc/tor/torrc --hush" but it returned that 'debain-tor' is the owner of '/var/lib/tor' not the user I was using. Tony.

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Re: [tor-relays] Raspberry Pi Relay Node Performance
by Harold Naparst 14 Aug '13

14 Aug '13

I updated my Raspberry Pi to 0.2.4.16-rc as Gordon Morehouse suggested. Almost immediately I can see a big difference. I now have 700 inbound connections, 4 outbound, and 14 circuits. Before it was about 150/15/50 or so. The download and upload rates are lower than before, but that might be because I have just restarted with the new version. Any thoughts?

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Planningon running bridge with bw limitation - config help
by Kali Tor 14 Aug '13

14 Aug '13

Hi all, I am planning on running a bridge-relay but have a hard 1TB/month outgoing traffic limitation. Can someone help me with a torrc config that works for this setup? Regards, Kali

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Is it safe to run an exit node from a VPS provider?
by Sindhudweep Sarkar 13 Aug '13

13 Aug '13

Hi, Over the past month I've been running a tor exit relay in a spare VPS machine that I am not using. It occurs to me know that this was probably a very poor idea, as I can't control the physical access to the machine or encrypt private key. In the good bad ISPs page<https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/doc/GoodBadISPs>, I see that some cloud providers are listed (aws, etc). This implies that such a practice is okay, but If linode or a malicious party wanted to read the contents of /var/lib/tor/keys I don't think they'd have any difficulty whatsoever. How do folks secure their relay's keys on a vps environment? Or should I shutdown this relay and run a relay only when I am sure the keys are secured? -JB

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Re: [tor-relays] Is it safe to run an exit node from a VPS provider?
by Sindhudweep Sarkar 13 Aug '13

13 Aug '13

Apologies if the reply goes to the wrong location in the thread. "... At least with Xen/KVM/VMware you're running on your own virtual disk..." Can't the virtual disk just be mounted by whoever has access? I don't think this is a large barrier to entry for anyone or a script looking for private keys. I could argue that pretty much every mac user has been getting software in the form of disk images, and these possibly non-technical users seem to have no issues.

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Question about TOR bandwidth management
by tor＠t-3.net 13 Aug '13

13 Aug '13

Hello, Is it possible to configure a TOR node to have different bandwidth limits at different times of day and on different days of the week? Thank you.

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Raspberry Pi Relay Node Performance and future Plans on Documentation and more
by Michael Berlin 13 Aug '13

13 Aug '13

Hi Gordon and Matthias, I've split your discussion from the original thread "Running exit-node in Germany" and created a new one. I fully agree with you that the Raspberry Pi is the perfect device to let others run a Tor Relay Node very easily. What follows is a long mail about my experiences and more thoughts about the Pi as relay. On Thu, Aug 1, 2013 at 5:29 PM, Gordon Morehouse <gordon(a)morehouse.me>wrote: > Matthias Redies: > > Ok that is good to know. Right know I will probably run it on 1-1.5 Mbps > > and later on 3-4 Mbps. What is the maximum your raspberry is capable to > > do? Please let me know if you publish your tutorial. > > I had it pushing about 1.5Mbps and crashing only about once a week > before I started having TCP connect floods and had to take it offline > until I could pay attention for a while. I'm still tuning it. It > crashed much, much more often before some basic tuning, though. > I'm running a relay node on a Raspberry Pi at my VDSL home connection for several weeks now (provider "Deutsche Telekom", connection is 50mbps down, 10 up) and I didn't run into such issues so far. There're already several howtos out there which describe how to setup a relay node on the Raspberry Pi. I used this German one as starting point: http://blog.weezerle.de/2013/01/11/raspberry-pi-als-tor-server/ My current configuration has only the following two non-default options: DisableDebuggerAttachment 0 AvoidDiskWrites 1 (Plus, I run it as relay only by disabling the socks proxy with "SocksPort 0".) Here's my node: https://atlas.torproject.org/#details/5AB2F49A1B79148E3A8F52808A00451DA0084… http://globe.rndm.de/#/relay/5AB2F49A1B79148E3A8F52808A00451DA00841B1 As you can see, it forwards on average between 2-4mbps (256-512 kB/sec) and there're peaks as high as 5.5mbps (~700 kB/s). The throughput varies depending on the day of week and time of day and therefore I believe the low average isn't the Raspberry's fault. I guess, if I set a higher advertised value, then I would see a more constant throughput closer to the peak value. Currently, it's set to 10mbps: RelayBandwidthRate 1024 KB RelayBandwidthBurst 1024 KB (Note that the Pi is definitely not able to forward 10mbps of Tor traffic, but it would be great to max it out 24/7.) The logged throughput is also consistent with what I saw with the console traffic monitor "nload" (suggested command line options for nicer units and less refreshes: nload -u K -U G -t 3000). I guess, I saw even higher peaks there. Monitoring everything with "arm" is also nice but far too CPU intensive. More information about my setup: - I have the B revision with 512 MB memory - running stock Raspbian - installed "tor" package 0.2.3.25-1 from the Raspbian repository - CPU is overclocked using "raspi-config" to 950 MHz Before I overclocked the Pi, I saw a similar average throughput. When you search for "rasp" at Tor Atlas or Globe (e.g. http://globe.rndm.de/#/search/query=rasp) , you can see that there're already more than 40 devices running. My node performs quite well compared to others and I would argue that it's in the top 5 among all Raspberry Pi nodes so far. To track down possible CPU problems, we should also compare the openssl benchmark results. The Raspberry Pi wiki has some reference values: http://elinux.org/RPi_Performance#Results_3 I've attached the summary output of "openssl speed" for my overclocked Pi (950 MHz) to this mail. As you can see, the numbers are higher than the reference one (I guess probably due to overclocking and different OpenSSL version). I've also attached the log of notices of the last 4 days (unfortunately no longer logs available). Within four days there was only one "Your computer is too slow to handle this many circuit creation requests!" warning and one "Failed to hand off onionskin.". In general I would say, I haven't seen any serious issues so far. > > And my plan is to publish my results to the entire list, because at $35, > Raspberry Pis can make *great* relays for slower home broadband, but > they need a little tender loving care first. :) > > I totally agree with you. Recently, there has been quite some buzz about the OnionPi howto (http://learn.adafruit.com/onion-pi/overview) but its main goal wasn't providing a long-running relay node. In my opinion, this should get addressed separately and made as simple as possible for novices. My guess is that many people want to contribute bandwidth, but they do not want to deal with Linux specifics (and definitely do not want to get into any trouble with the police). They need a plug-and-forget solution: attach the Pi to the router and leave it running in the closet for months. If it has to be restarted, Tor Weather can send them an email. What do you think about documenting the setup of the relay in the Tor wiki? https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki I'm not very familiar with the Tor Project yet, but to me it looks like the wiki will be the best place. Other people can contribute as well and it will be visible enough. It would be good if there's an always up-to-date wiki page which could become the reference for new users. The idea of the Raspberry Pi as relay node could be even further expanded: - Matthias already mentioned that there should be a specific image for it. I agree! - New users would prefer a simple webinterface to configure the relay (basically a Vidalia as webinterface :-) - Such a webinterface should also show statistics e.g., "Your node has forwarded 1 TB in the last 4 weeks." This will show people that their contribution made a difference and it will make them happy and more confident about it. Eventually, they'll convince others to run a relay as well. I won't have the time to realize these ideas, but maybe others want to jump in. Further work and testing could be coordinated on this mailing list? I hope to have something up in a week or two, I need to watch it for a > while and continue to tweak, and maybe develop a solution for the TCP > storms that can bring down a lot of consumer routers, before publishing > for all. > I run a regular Linux PC as router which forwards all the traffic of the Pi. The machine has more than enough CPU power and therefore I haven't seen any issues there. Since the two months that I run the relay node on the Pi, my Linux PC router has frozen twice (which didn't happen before). But I'm not sure that it can be related to the forwarding of the relay node traffic. For a broader adaption it's definitely necessary to look into the behavior of the most popular routers e.g., the ones given out by the major providers. These things could be documented on the Tor Wiki as well. Best regards, Michael

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No disk space for new files created by Tor
by TonyXue 12 Aug '13

12 Aug '13

Dear All, Today when I was checking my Tor notice log file as usual, I noticed that they've included the following warnings: Aug 11 06:23:15.000 [warn] Unable to store router descriptorAug 11 06:23:15.000 [warn] Error writing to "/var/lib/tor/cached-descriptors.new": No space left on device It seems that I've run out of space. But my VPS comes with 35GB disk space and it shouldn't be used up so fast. So how to deal with it?If I do run out of space,any advice for deleting the old files of Tor? Are there any files created by Tor are not useful anymore and can be deleted? Cheers,Tony

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Recommendation on exit node in DE/NL
by Kali Tor 09 Aug '13

09 Aug '13

Hi all, Is there any recommendation for running Tor _exit_ node in NL/DE? The list at https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/doc/GoodBadISPs see,s pretty old and outdated and contradictory at places. Thanks Kali

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"NumCPUs 2" or 2 copies of Tor?
by Steve Snyder 08 Aug '13

08 Aug '13

Given plenty of RAM, a muti-core CPU and a single IP address, which is more efficient: a single instance of Tor configured with "NumCPUs 2" or 2 instances of Tor configured with "NumCPUs 1" and different port numbers? Thanks.

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