[tor-dev] Tor Relay Setup Wizard

Damian Johnson atagar1 at gmail.com
Thu Jul 14 04:49:22 UTC 2011


> I'd suggest sticking with the name 'Non-exit' relay rather than making up
> a new term ('Internal Relay') that nobody else uses. Unless you want to
> convince everybody that non-exit relay is a bad name and we should switch?

Sebastian had the same concern. We adopted the term "exit" and
"non-exit" because we were describe ExitPolicy entries rather than
relay roles. The term "non-exit" says... well, that you're not an exit
but not what you are, which is providing interconnections between
participants in the tor network.

Personally I think that we should be offering users the analogy that
tor is a network of participants (users and middle hops) with exit
points from that network out into the wider Internet. This gives a
good, simple abstraction for why this last role produces abuse
complaints and the former doesn't.

Though again, if I'm outnumbered on this then I'll go with the majority.

> Your description of an exit relay may mislead people into thinking that
> it *only* handles exit traffic -- meaning it doesn't get connections
> from users.

True, though I don't think that we should try to include that in the
description. Why do you think that this is an important detail for new
relay operators to understand?

> Does "Low Relaying Ports" mean 'try to bind to 80 and 443'? Perhaps that
> should be 'Listen on Popular Ports'? I guess it depends if your users
> know what 'Low' is and what it implies.

Very good idea - changed to "Use Popular Ports"

> Or maybe it's better as a faq entry (to avoid "omg there are
> so many pages how was I ever supposed to find that one")?

I tried that for a while. Our faqs make bad landing pages and the trac
urls are too long. As mentioned in my reply to Karsten I agree that
this will need to become tpo pages, however I think my pages turned
out very nicely so until there's tpo alternatives this doesn't strike
me as a large concern.

> In the comments at the very top, I'd suggest changing "restart tor" to
> "or restart tor", to make it clearer that any one of the three steps
> will accomplish the goal.

Good idea. Changed.

> You might also want to change the comments on the Log and DirPortFrontPage
> lines so they show up before the config line, meaning you can actually
> read the comment.

The audience I had in mind for the comments were people hand editing
the torrc, where those lines look fine (the confirmation dialog's
width is only 58). Though I probably should add line wrapping...

Cheers! -Damian


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