Dear fellow relay operators,
I've been hosting a tor relay on a VPS (strato) for a couple days now. I've never done this before, so I have a couple of questions:
- Is it normal for my relay to only use up only about 2 MB/s after nearly 5 days of uptime despite bandwidth speed tests done with speedtest-cli generally reporting significantly higher bandwidth? - Is it normal for my relay to advertise 7.37 MiB/s on its relay search page despite bandwidth speed tests done with speedtest-cli generally reporting significantly higher bandwidth? - Do I have to mark somewhere that I'm hosting the tor relay on a VPS (which means technically a company also has control over the relay)? - Is this mailing list a good place to ask these questions? Or am I reaching too many people by doing this?
When I say I performed a bandwidth test, I mean I performed a bandwidth test with the speedtest-cli debian package. The test generally tells me I have about 217 MB/s download speed and 113 MB/s upload speed. The nickname of my relay is observatory123 and its fingerprint is:
45431BF8AB66C673942C1E344BB520625CE5F817
Kind regards,
observatory123
Hi,
To give some answers: Yes this is completely normal! It can take 2-3 months for a new guard relay to finally be 'ramped up'. Here you can read more about it: https://blog.torproject.org/lifecycle-of-a-new-relay/. Exit relays ramp up much faster in terms of bandwidth, but come with their own headaches/challenges vs. guard relays. This is normal as well. I don't know speedtest-cli specifically, but I imagine it's a regular tcp/udp speedtest while Tor traffic is more likely to be CPU limited instead of network throughput limited. Just pushing some udp/tcp traffic with a speedtest is a great to find the limitations of your server's uplink (for example 1000 Mb/s down but 200 Mb/s up on certain VPS providers, which means Tor can use up to 200 Mb/s in practice). But the real bandwidth Tor will be able to push is more often limited by the CPU. You should slowly see your CPU utilization go towards 100% in the next couple of months (if the relay stays stable enough). The Tor Project doesn't ask this of relay operators. Personally I regard VPS hosted Tor Relays as 'not/less secure' because of the trivial access parties have to these relays, their keys/certificates and their traffic, but as far as I know the Tor community/Project considers all relays to be equal however they are hosted. Do note that if you're running the relay from a legal entity in the EEA, that your VPS provider is a processor and needs to be registered as such in your own registry and stuff. Tor's data being encrypted doesn't exclude it from the GDPR because encryption is equal to pseudonymization instead of anonymization in the EEA. But if you're just a person running some Tor relays then you don't need to bother with this :-). Sure it is! This way everyone can chime in and learn/contribute. On IRC/Element there is also a #tor-relay channel for chatting with other Tor operators if that's what you like to use. Looking at your relay I see nothing out of the ordinary. If anything, I feel ~2 MB/s of traffic after a few days already is quite nice and also a bit more than many other guard relays expect in the first couple of days (it's a bit random in my experience) :). The question is whether the 7.66 MB/s advertised bandwidth based on the tests of the Tor network is true to your machine's capabilities. And you will soon find that out if you wait for the guard relay to age a bit.
One final thing: do note that Tor's single threaded architecture only let's it utilize a single CPU core (plus a bit of overhead on a second core). So let's say you have 4 vcores in your VPS, then you actually would need to run 2-4 Tor relays to be able to utilize those fully. Otherwise it will just cap at 1.2-1.4 cores. You can run up to 8 relays per IP address. If you have more than 2 cores, I would advice to already create 1 or more additional guard relays because they take months to ramp up. It's easier to delete a few redundant relays later than having to wait for new ones to ramp up :-).
Good luck running the relay and don't hesitate to ask more questions when you have them!
Cheers,
tornth
Aug 20, 2024, 07:50 by tor-relays@lists.torproject.org:
Dear fellow relay operators,
I've been hosting a tor relay on a VPS (strato) for a couple days now. I've never done this before, so I have a couple of questions:
Is it normal for my relay to only use up only about 2 MB/s after nearly 5 days of uptime despite bandwidth speed tests done with speedtest-cli generally reporting significantly higher bandwidth? Is it normal for my relay to advertise > 7.37 MiB/s on its relay search page despite > bandwidth speed tests done with speedtest-cli generally reporting significantly higher bandwidth? Do I have to mark somewhere that I'm hosting the tor relay on a VPS (which means > technically> a company also has control over the relay)? Is this mailing list a good place to ask these questions? Or am I reaching too many people by doing this?
When I say I performed a bandwidth test, I mean I performed a bandwidth test with the speedtest-cli debian package. The test generally tells me I have about 217 MB/s download speed and 113 MB/s upload speed. The nickname of my relay is observatory123 and its fingerprint is: 45431BF8AB66C673942C1E344BB520625CE5F817
Kind regards, observatory123
Hello,
Yes it's very normal. After 2 weeks you will see the speed increasing. You can read here about the lifecycle of a new relay https://blog.torproject.org/lifecycle-of-a-new-relay/
Kind regards, Tzanca
On Monday, August 19th, 2024 at 9:01 PM, observatory123 via tor-relays tor-relays@lists.torproject.org wrote:
Dear fellow relay operators,
I've been hosting a tor relay on a VPS (strato) for a couple days now. I've never done this before, so I have a couple of questions:
- Is it normal for my relay to only use up only about 2 MB/s after nearly 5 days of uptime despite bandwidth speed tests done with speedtest-cli generally reporting significantly higher bandwidth?
- Is it normal for my relay to advertise 7.37 MiB/s on its relay search page despite bandwidth speed tests done with speedtest-cli generally reporting significantly higher bandwidth?
- Do I have to mark somewhere that I'm hosting the tor relay on a VPS (which means technically a company also has control over the relay)?
- Is this mailing list a good place to ask these questions? Or am I reaching too many people by doing this?
When I say I performed a bandwidth test, I mean I performed a bandwidth test with the speedtest-cli debian package. The test generally tells me I have about 217 MB/s download speed and 113 MB/s upload speed. The nickname of my relay is observatory123 and its fingerprint is:
45431BF8AB66C673942C1E344BB520625CE5F817
Kind regards,
observatory123
Hey,
this should help you out:
https://blog.torproject.org/lifecycle-of-a-new-relay/
Sincerely, George
On Monday, August 19th, 2024 at 8:01 PM, observatory123 via tor-relays tor-relays@lists.torproject.org wrote:
Dear fellow relay operators,
I've been hosting a tor relay on a VPS (strato) for a couple days now. I've never done this before, so I have a couple of questions:
- Is it normal for my relay to only use up only about 2 MB/s after nearly 5 days of uptime despite bandwidth speed tests done with speedtest-cli generally reporting significantly higher bandwidth?
- Is it normal for my relay to advertise 7.37 MiB/s on its relay search page despite bandwidth speed tests done with speedtest-cli generally reporting significantly higher bandwidth?
- Do I have to mark somewhere that I'm hosting the tor relay on a VPS (which means technically a company also has control over the relay)?
- Is this mailing list a good place to ask these questions? Or am I reaching too many people by doing this?
When I say I performed a bandwidth test, I mean I performed a bandwidth test with the speedtest-cli debian package. The test generally tells me I have about 217 MB/s download speed and 113 MB/s upload speed. The nickname of my relay is observatory123 and its fingerprint is:
45431BF8AB66C673942C1E344BB520625CE5F817
Kind regards, observatory123
Telegram is Russian and spying :
- creator Pavel Durov a Russian who refuses to use the world-known encryption algorythms and uses his (MTProto) implying that the Russian have the encryption keys.
source : https://restoreprivacy.com/secure-encrypted-messaging-apps/telegram/
- The servers are in the Arab Emirates (part of the B.R.I.C.S and allies of Russia) who have gained against the cia some immunity in exchange for their Oil.
source : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telegram_(software)
- The App is officially sharing information about any device and messages with the Russian authorities, who use the Telegram conversation officially in trials against opponents. source : https://www.wired.com/story/the-kremlin-has-entered-the-chat/
How does this align with any of Tor's values?
Carlos.
On Montag, 26. August 2024 00:45:20 CEST eff_03675549@posteo.se wrote:
Telegram is Russian and spying :
- creator Pavel Durov
was arrested yesterday in France.
In general, I would like to point out SimpleX-Chat. https://simplex.chat/ https://github.com/simplex-chat/simplexmq
I've been using it for a few months. Decentralized, no ID, protected metadata, multiple user profiles, some designs taken from the Tor protocol. All SimpleX servers optionally accessible via Tor and you can run your own private SimpleX server.
Jack Dorsey invested a large sum in further development a few days ago.
On Mon Aug 26, 2024 at 4:11 AM PDT, boldsuck via tor-relays wrote:
On Montag, 26. August 2024 00:45:20 CEST eff_03675549@posteo.se wrote:
Telegram is Russian and spying :
- creator Pavel Durov
was arrested yesterday in France.
In general, I would like to point out SimpleX-Chat. https://simplex.chat/ https://github.com/simplex-chat/simplexmq
I've been using it for a few months. Decentralized, no ID, protected metadata, multiple user profiles, some designs taken from the Tor protocol. All SimpleX servers optionally accessible via Tor and you can run your own private SimpleX server.
It does seem promising.
I would note the following:
1. It doesn't appear the server can launch exclusively on the Tor network. Nor the client. Further, the server uses the IP as the CN during initialization. How much this matters, I don't know.
2. It's not clear to me how the client would be configured to exclusively bind to self-hosted infra (except to add own servers and remove all the ones in there by default).
3. It would be nice for someone to post about their experience bootstrapping their own self-hosted SimpleX, soup to nuts, and how it went, but I couldn't find any in a casual search, except some people talking about it on Reddit (such as the QR code linking). I'd like to step through replicating someone's (working) approach, how they brought it all together, what worked and what didn't, etc.
Jack Dorsey invested a large sum in further development a few days ago.
VCs do not invest without the expectation of profits, however modest those expectations could be. Profit motives aren't in and of themselves a dead-end (as Proton AG creates a foundation to, as they say, "put people before profits") ... but it gives me (opinion) some suspicion.
It could be that jack is interested in the long tail of what SimpleX means to growing some other companies.
$1.3M is not much, IMO.
"Name still reminds everyone of herpes." -- jack
Unfortunate, but as he says, fixable.
But the bar for using SimpleX for sharing bridge lines probably isn't lower than Telegram. There could be chilling effects associated with Durov's arrest, so self-hosting could become very important. It should have already been important, but the sheep don't care about these things until they're under threat.
fjord
boldsuck via tor-relays wrote on 8/26/24 13:11:
On Montag, 26. August 2024 00:45:20 CEST eff_03675549@posteo.se wrote:
Telegram is Russian and spying :
- creator Pavel Durov
was arrested yesterday in France.
All this is pretty scary. Pretty much any exit node manager can be arrested on the very same basis.
Marco https://metrics.torproject.org/rs.html#details/A4E74410D83705EEFF24BC265DE2B...
On Montag, 26. August 2024 17:33:22 CEST Marco Predicatori wrote:
All this is pretty scary. Pretty much any exit node manager can be arrested on the very same basis.
No. A Tor router does not host any data, it is a router like any other ISP or backbone router.
I am currently updating the exit pages for Europe/Germany because the laws have been updated. With Tor, the client initiates the circuits, not the relays/router.
http://tor-exit-33.for-privacy.net/
8< ... A Tor relay is a simple data carrier (mere conduit) in the terms of Article 12 of the european directive 2000/31/EC of 8 June 2000: we do not initiate the transmissions, we do not select the receiver of the transmission, and we do not select or modify the information contained in the transmission. Therefore, we are not liable for the information transmitted.
Amendment of directive 2000/31/EC: CHAPTER II, Article 4, ‘Mere conduit’ - the Digital Services Act (DSA) Regulation (EU) 2022/2065 of 19 October 2022
Tor routers owned by German media services are protected by Article 4 Digital- Services-Act ... >8
In addition, Telegram is a centralized service. Tor and SimpleX are decentralized.
*And anybody can be arrested *for having some Anti-regime conversation*over Telegram* that has spontaneously opted for Obscure,
- closed source-code, - non-auditable, - servers in the EAU, - with a weak-encryption one-of-a-kind alternative to globally recognized consensus, - long known to be fawned globally, - submissive to the FSB in REAL-TIME.
Tor is all the opposite... how has our self-acclaimed specialist skills fallen for, SIGNAL not, yet Telegram /TO COMMUNICATE NEW BRIDGES?. /
Free public French victimization of the Agent from prospective beneficiary govs. is a blessing for a quick proselyte ASSANGE!! / Z/UCKERBERG?? --> to --->/ DUROV#$ association, when 8 million uneducated users want for their privacy: a Father.
Using Telegram is in line with those who want to offer bridges and dissidents to govs.
Please do not take that literally here, yet too honestly: /how more difficult would be for a regime to censor communication of new Bridges even if that was done to random addresses by postal mail on a hand-written paper with a pen!./
Carlos.
On 8/26/24 12:45 AM, eff_03675549@posteo.se wrote:
Telegram is Russian and spying :
- creator Pavel Durov a Russian who refuses to use the world-known
encryption algorythms and uses his (MTProto) implying that the Russian have the encryption keys.
source : https://restoreprivacy.com/secure-encrypted-messaging-apps/telegram/
- The servers are in the Arab Emirates (part of the B.R.I.C.S and
allies of Russia) who have gained against the cia some immunity in exchange for their Oil.
source : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telegram_(software)
- The App is officially sharing information about any device and
messages with the Russian authorities, who use the Telegram conversation officially in trials against opponents. source : https://www.wired.com/story/the-kremlin-has-entered-the-chat/
How does this align with any of Tor's values?
Carlos.
tor-relays@lists.torproject.org