Hi,
I am trying to run a few Exit relays on my 1 gbps connection. To keep donating the exit capacity to the Tor project I have to keep abuse reports to a minimum.
In order to have the Exit flag I have read that I have to keep two of ports 80, 443 and 6667 open, plus allow exiting to at least one /8 network - is that still the Dir spec? Is it correct that without the Exit flag, no clients will choose the relay for their circuits - even if its Exit policy allows the port they need? For example, take a look at the "cry" relay (one of top 10) - it is not marked as "Exit" as it only allows ports 6660-6667 - does that mean it is only ever used as a middle relay?
I have read that port 80 generates quite a bit of abuse complaints as it is used to tunnel non-HTTP traffic, by malware, etc. So, choosing ports 443 and 6667 to get the 'Exit' flag looks like the safest choice. I have also read that ports above 1024 are more likely to used by BitTorrent clients, so they are to be rejected in order to minimize abuse.
My current, rather paranoid, list of accepted ports looks like this: 20-21, 53, 443, 993, 995, 6667. I am not sure how useful this is to Tor, and whether I will actually avoid complaints, but I guess I can only wait and see.
My question is about 6667 - should Tor's 'Exit flag policy' allow 6697 (IRC encrypted over SSL) as an alternative to 6667? I would rather support people using 6697, if I had the choice.
Thanks, Igor