- tor-relays - lists.torproject.org

VPS Hardware Specification & Advice
by torrelay＠mail.md 06 Aug '13

06 Aug '13

Greetings! My ISP British Telecom is rate limiting my Internet connection despite a big splashy advertising campaign earlier this year in which it claimed that it would no longer rate limit during so-called 'peak hours' or cap the bandwidth consumption when it reaches a ceiling that they decide is 'too much'. I've tried various bandwidth rates that are a sensible percentage of the total available bandwidth but anything above a very small amount (50-80KB/s) is being rate limited even though the total amount of bandwidth available is approximately 30.00 Mbps downstream & 6.12 Mbps upstream. Now even 50-80 KB/s is rate limited. Well, it's the school holidays started recently here & BT have just brought out a new streaming sports service which coincides with my bandwidth being rate becoming limited from about 2 weeks ago. I was able to run a consistently faster tor relay on British Telecom 7 years ago than I can today & I don't want to speak with a telephone operative in India who follows a script & will test my connection. I just take my business somewhere else -- rant finished! Consequently I've sourced a company, located in a Scandinavian country, offering a VPS with 1TB of data consumption per month for approximately 18 Euros (more than half the price of my shitty, crippled British Telecom Internet connection) so I'll try this. The cost of running the VPS is based on the hardware specification which brings me to my question. I plan to utilise the full 1TB of data each month & I'd like some idea if the specification (below) is sufficient for an entry/middleman tor relay using 1000GB bandwidth per month. The hardware specification I've chosen is: CPU Cores: 1 - exact details of CPU are not specified on the company's website, problem? RAM Memory: 1024 MiB Traffic: 1000GB Drive: 50GB Price: 18 Euros I'm completely new to VPS & am sure this will be a learning curve but no matter I will try to see if I can make it work even if performance of VPS might not be perfect. If anyone has written a guide to hosting a tor relay on a VPS, I'd welcome any links to further information or any other useful advice based on experience of others. Best regards, Edvard.

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VPS
by Tom McLoughlin 04 Aug '13

04 Aug '13

I'm looking for a VPS to run a tor exit node on, any ideas? Regards, Tom McLoughlin

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Running an obfuscated bridge at home still safe?
by z0rc 03 Aug '13

03 Aug '13

Hi, I've been running an obfuscated bridge on a Raspberry Pi at home (in Switzerland) for a week now. Until recently, I thought running a bridge at home was no problem at all. But yesterday Paul Staroch reported in [1] that he got notice from the German police (BKA) concerning his non-exit relay. So I'm a bit scared now. Is it still believed to be safe to run a non-exit relay or bridge at home? Or is this just one single incident? Any other experiences on this? Cheers, z0rc [1] https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-relays/2013-August/002365.html

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Attacker IP database
by Bryan Carey 03 Aug '13

03 Aug '13

Is there any kind of compiled list of IPs that relay operators can refer to that are known bad IPs (sources of brute force SSH attempts, etc.)? Is there a reason to NOT block (drop) traffic from these IPs? Here are some that I have seen recently trying to brute force common user accounts and root password attempts: 198.50.197.98 220.161.148.178 223.4.217.47 199.187.125.250 175.99.95.252 62.64.83.38 125.209.110.234 37.235.53.172 Also, in general what are some good security practices to keep in mind while running a Tor relay? Thanks, Bryan

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Relay or Obfuscated Bridge?
by Richard Budd 02 Aug '13

02 Aug '13

I have several Tor relays running on VPS providers around the world (the 7 bucks a month kind). Most have around 5 to 6 meg a second bandwidth available. Would it be more useful for the Tor system to change a few of them over to obfuscated bridges?

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Tor bridge on Amazon not doing much
by Shawn A. Miller 02 Aug '13

02 Aug '13

I've been running a Tor bridge on the Amazon EC2 cloud computing platform (per instructions at https://cloud.torproject.org/) since July 27, and while the bridge is up and running according to the logs, there doesn't seem to be much traffic running through it, i.e., latest logs indicate Tor uptime is 2 days 12 hours with 2 circuits open; 6.6 MB sent and 45.75 MB received. Have I somehow managed to misconfigure the bridge or is this normal? Best, Shawn

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Running exit-node in Germany
by Matthias Redies 02 Aug '13

02 Aug '13

Hello, I want to run an exit-node through mit home connection. Has anyone experience with running a Tor-Relay in Germany( Bavaria)? Are there known cases of police raids? Is there a list of lawyers which work with the torproject which should be called in case of a raid? Has anyone had sucsess with talking to the police prior to setting up the exit-node? If so, to which departmed did you talk to? Yours Matthias

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Home broadband - worth running a relay?
by Nick 01 Aug '13

01 Aug '13

Hi there, I have a reasonable ADSL connection, and a little always-on server. The bandwidth is in the region of 2Mib/s down, something less up (maybe 256Kib/s). Is it useful for me to run a tor relay with this bandwidth? I'd like to run one which isn't an exit, at least for now. If not, am I correct in thinking that a bridge is an appropriate help? That's what I'm doing currently, but if a relay would be more useful I'd be very happy to do that. One other unrelated(ish) question: I'm in the UK, where the idea of censorship isn't resisted as strongly as it ought to be, and as a result my internet connection is subject to a smallish amount of censorship: whatever is on the secret IWF blacklist plus the pirate bay. Does this mean that running an exit node from a home connection here at some point in the future would not be helpful? Or only if all HTTP(S) was blocked (as the IWF blacklist is secret there's presumably no way to tell the tor network what is inaccessible from this node). Thanks in advance, Nick

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Diagnosing "relay unresponsive" messages
by Gordon Morehouse 01 Aug '13

01 Aug '13

So, I've got my relay back up on a Raspberry Pi and I'm working on figuring out the optimizations I made to it, and continuing to tune it. Out of the box these machines have some difficulty even offering a couple Mbps, but they can be greatly improved. I will post all details when done. I see a fair amount of this, much less than after some tweaks, but it still happens: 20:27:36 [ARM_NOTICE] Relay resumed [1 duplicate hidden] 20:27:30 [ARM_NOTICE] Relay unresponsive (last heartbeat: Wed Jul 31 20:27:19 2013) 19:50:57 [ARM_NOTICE] Relay unresponsive (last heartbeat: Wed Jul 31 19:50:4 This often happens at the same time as 'arm' (the monitoring program) may stutter, fail to render a few frames, then 'catch up' or redraw the screen. I'm trying to figure out what's going on so I can prevent it. It doesn't always correlate with traffic - it happens more often when there's more traffic but can happen even with very little. Tor is taking about 10% RAM, there's plenty free, and load is under 1.0. Best, -Gordon M.

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What to do about port scans?
by Steve Snyder 31 Jul '13

31 Jul '13

I wouldn't have thought that the Tor network was fast enough for port scanning, but apparently it is. I have recently seen a rash of SSH port scanning (or so my ISP reports). What can/should I do about this? I know I can limit the rate of connections using iptables. What's the consensus on this? Is this considered advisable, or a breach of expected exit node behavior? Do I have any options other than iptables to restrict the rate of port 22 connection attempts? Thanks.

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