New relay on dynamic IP address
Hello, I started a new relay at home. I was really surprised to see it gain a Guard flag in about a week since it first came online. My first relay (on a VPS) became a Guard well over a month after I set it up. How can I assess what was different this time? Also, I’m wondering what will happen when the dynamic IP changes. Sooner or later I’ll have a power outage or restart the modem. Last time my IP changed it happened overnight for no evident reason. Will this relay lose its flags? Is a really with a dynamic IP address useful at all? Cheers, -m
hi m, did you use the docs about Part 3: https://community.torproject.org/relay/setup/guard/debianubuntu/updates/ 3. Automatically reboot If you want to automatically reboot add the following at the the end of the file /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/50unattended-upgrades: Unattended-Upgrade::Automatic-Reboot "true"; - or do i misunderstand something? Regards David Sent with ProtonMail Secure Email. ‐‐‐‐‐‐‐ Original Message ‐‐‐‐‐‐‐ On Thursday, January 23, 2020 2:19 PM, Mario Costa <mario.costa@icloud.com> wrote:
On Thu, Jan 23, 2020 at 03:19:52PM +0100, Mario Costa wrote:
If your IP address doesn't change every day but only every now and then then yes, it's definitely a useful relay. Should the IP address change too often, your relay might loose its "guard" or even "stable" flag but I recommend you just see what will happen. I have a relay (6B185DEEB249E4BA6182ECA077530C45E98A6C5F) that's also just running at home with a dynamic IP address and it still has its "Stable" flag. -- OpenPGP Key: 47BC7DE83D462E8BED18AA861224DBD299A4F5F3 https://www.parckwart.de/pgp_key
However, if you’re planning to run a node from your home, consider a few things. Forget about running an exit node: you will experience a heavy overblocking and hostility. And any node will bring some level of harassment, because ignorance is widespread. A second thing is that from time to time someone is trying to DoS nodes. In those 5 years I’ve seen a few of those, so I assume the average is like once per year of operation. Just accept the inevitable reality of running a node at home: there will be a day or a week in which you will observe thousands connections coming to your PC, all cores suddenly running at 100% without no apparent reason &c. Treat it as a way to gain experience.
Thanks Jonathan, mpan and John. I still don’t understand what happens when the authorities see that my IP is dynamic. Will they prevent the relay from becoming a guard? I didn’t know about the DoS problem, that’s something I didn’t experience yet with my other, older relay. Maybe not being and exit helps. Cheers, -m
That is exactly what will happen you will become a normal middle relay Thanks, John Csuti (216) 236-3309 https://www.coolcomputers.info/
Dear Mario, In almost 2 years I've been running a middle relay from home, I have had about 15 ip changes. One time they came and replaced my equipment and it was down about 5 hours. It started back up with about 6 connections, but was back at a full 3000 in a few hours. I've never had a guard flag, even with my current 3+months tor uptime with the same ip address. I only run a terabyte a month through it, so maybe that's too little, though it does have the fast flag. The first 6 or 8 months before a new tor version came out, there was a lot more traffic than I wanted to handle, just to keep under my ISP's radar, so I had the config set up to turn off tor when the daily limit was reached, usually between 8 and 10 pm. Then it would start up again after midnight. I asked if this was still worth it, and the gurus said yes. So I'd say that a few ip changes are going to be small potatoes compared to turning the relay off for hours every night. So glad you are running a relay. "A chicken in every pot, and a relay in every house." --torix Sent with ProtonMail Secure Email. ‐‐‐‐‐‐‐ Original Message ‐‐‐‐‐‐‐ On Thursday, January 23, 2020 2:19 PM, Mario Costa <mario.costa@icloud.com> wrote:
Torix, This is really useful. I forced an IP change and the relay lost the guardian flag. I guess that now the authorities know that it’s running on a dynamic IP connection and won’t assign a guard flag anymore. I was really surprised when the relay became a guard in about a week of uptime. By the way, I didn’t set a traffic limit. Hope this doesn’t upset my ISP, but my little RPi is happily talking with almost 4000 peers :) -m
Just reporting back after some time. Today I noticed that my relay running at home with a dynamic IP got a guard flag again. So it’s totally possible for a relay to become a guard even after the authorities notice that it has a dynamic IP address.It must be noted though that the IP address didn’t change since it lost the guard flag the first time. It looks like I had it wrong when I concluded that after the first IP change the relay wouldn’t became a guard anymore. For reference, the relay fingerprint is F942EE73F1B8E39125F617FA85E80E4C9E540A2E. -m
participants (7)
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David Poulsen -
John Csuti -
Jonathan Marquardt -
Mario Costa -
mpan -
teor -
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