[tor-relays] Raspberry Pi Relay Node Performance and future Plans on Documentation and more

[Gordon Morehouse]

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Good news, everyone!

Lance Hathaway:
> Speaking only for myself (in turn), this is something I would
> desperately like to see. I've been planning on deploying several
> Raspberry Pis for Tor, but seeing all the reports on storms and
> routers crashing and etc. has demonstrated that it's just not ready
> for prime time yet--unless you go into all the debugging and manual
> tweaking required.


I've put binary .debs[1] up of the latest Tor experimental version -
0.2.4.16-rc - which are built for the Raspberry Pi.  I only have a few
days of test data, but so far it appears to perform much better than
0.2.3.x.

I'm working to get a few more Pi-based relays into the homes of
friends so I can experiment with congestion avoidance and easy setup
and eventually make a Raspbian 'flavor' and .deb metapackage that can
turn any Pi into a high stable, extremely congestion-avoidant Tor relay.

The congestion avoidance paranoia is because of this inevitable truth:
if the TorPi that Johnny plugged into grandma's broadband makes
Netflix or Hulu perform poorly, grandma will unplug it.  So, I'm
anticipating on writing some scripts and utilizing some relatively new
kernel congestion avoidance facilities such as TCP CoDel[2].

This will take a while, don't hold your breath.  But in light of
recent news, I'm committed to it.

[1]
https://github.com/gordon-morehouse/torbian/tree/master/raspbian_packages

[2]
http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/05/codel-buffer-management-could-solve-the-internets-bufferbloat-jams/

Best,
- -Gordon M.


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