Hi,
below you find my notes for the relay operators meeting we had in Valencia. Those just some short notes. If you have any questions or remarks, please don't hesitate.
* Introduction Several Tor relay operators met at Tor Developer meeting in Valencia, Spain. At our meeting we had operators from the following countries: - Germany - Netherlands - France - Spain - India - Costa Rica This document gives a short overview what we discussed. If you have any questions or comments don't hesitate.
* DDoS attacks: One questions which was raised is what to do against DDoS attacks. Several ISPs complained about DDoS attacks against Tor relays. There were also shutdowns of servers.
It was suggested to employ DDoS mitigation tools. Other operators suggested to don't do anything. It is better to educate the ISP about Tor.
Do you have any experiences with this topic?
* Abuse TorServers has templates for different cases of abuse. See [[https://www.torservers.net/wiki/abuse/templates]]. The Tor Project offers also some advice in their wiki. See [[https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/doc/TorAbuseTemplates]]. Furthermore several organisations developed their own templates. Someone at the meeting offered to review others templates.
As a general advice one should start with thanking the person and acknowledge what they do.
TODO: We should rephrase some of the templates and generate some hice, good example documents.
* Bridges The current alpha release of Tor Browser Bundle 4.5 comes with support for obfs4. Currently there are only few bridges which use obfs4 and everyone is asked to enable the new protocol.
Obfs3 doesn't really work in China and obfs4 is the current best bet. If you have any questions about obfs4 you should have a look at the documentation or write an email to Yawning (yawning@torproject.org).
Some links: - How to run an obfs4 bridge: https://tor.stackexchange.com/q/6370/88 - Debian package: https://packages.debian.org/search?keywords=obfs4proxy - Post at tor-relays: https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-relays/2014-September/005372.html
* Tor relays in Japan It is legal to run relays in Japan, but practically it depends on ISP. So if you know a person in Japan, encourage them to run a Tor relay.
It was said that relays from SE asia went online for some time and slowed down the overall network. Jens talked to Mike Perry who couldn't remember such incident and also couldn't believe that this is true.
* Relays in India There are some relays in India, some of them probably in universities and some very slow. A home connection is 60/60MB/s and capped at 8GB/80GB per month. I couldn't really understand what the correct numbers were.
* How to make nodes faster Someone had a 10Gig which link was not used. It was recommended to use multiple processes; one process per core. So also hints at https://blog.torproject.org/blog/lifecycle-of-a-new-relay
* Tor wheather Several peopel work on Tor weather. The status is not clear. However there is some need for a working version.
* ARM devices We found out that several organisation have utilised some ARM device. Juris from Torservers runs a Bananapi at a data center and gets 30-40MB/s. DFRI has a router which they give away to interested persons. Jacob Appelbaum made a combination of Relay and Router.
Merlijn suggested that Hardkernel has some faster ones which fit for exit relays.
We want to work more closely together to create some neat device.
* Stats on exits Someone asked if it is OK to run statistics on exit relays. As long as the tools only monitor the amount of traffic this is OK. Looking into exit traffic or even messing with the traffic would instantly qualify you as a bad exit.
* Legal issues + Germany has no data retention law in place + data retention in the Netherlands: court case said illegal, try to make a law + France: https://netzpolitik.org/2015/franzoesischer-patriot-act-ueberwachungsmassnah... (yes, data retention since 2011) + article 12 of ecommerce directive + Costa Rica has no data retention law
* World Hosting Days + Who is interested to go there?
* TODO - Work on templates - How many DMCA notices do you get? Can you give Jens some monthly numbers together with the exit probability of your relays? An EFF person wanted to collect some numbers. Jens will relay those numbers. - run obfs4 bridges