Tor Exit Relay have the ability to filter traffic by allowing the operator make choices based on personal preferences for personal, legal (ex: country of origin) and for other reasons.
Non-exit Relays do not have the ability to set "Relay Policies" (torcc??), and why would they, considering that all this traffic is encrypted anyway, as I understand it, and one would not ever know what type of traffic it is, or its origin, based on the bandwidth graph. I checked my smoothwall firewall logs it does not seem to show the traffic flowing on my relay, I guess this would be obvious because it's Tor traffic; unless I'm not filtering the logs correctly.
Running a Tor relay seems straightforward and one could just fire-it-up and easily contribute to the network. But my curiosity gets the best of me.
I was looking to add additional URL Filter rules for my smoothwall as a more centralized way of controlling what gets to the LAN for my users. While checking for additional blocklists I came upon P2P rules and I started to compare the new blocklists with my old ones and then I stumbled upon PeerBlock which has been around for a while.
On Windows 7, PeerBlock seemed to provide two things I was looking to test on a TOR Relay:
1. Real Time Traffic Logging (ip's and ports logged) 2. The ability to filter traffic.
Apparently I am able to do both with PeerBlock, although I'm sure there are more suitable and capable tools available out there that do this, but I'm not aware of or have used any of these tools.
In peerblock I can create new custom lists and completely block specific ip ranges (ex: warez, torrents etc.), and I am able to see what traffic is allowed or blocked based on policies created.
1. What problems, if any, arise from using peerblock and Tor together? 2. Why do we not have the ability to at least set our own policy for the type of traffic on a relay just like an Exit Relay?