[tor-relays] Bad experience with hetzner.de and "Trusted Tor Traceroutes" experiment

[Paul Görgen]

Hi again,

Hetzner now blocked my testing Server. This gave me chance to finally 
get into contact with a human person. They said their IDS triggered on 
"connects to unrouted IPs" (I assume that will be connects to unrouted 
IPs per time). I will try to convince them to set up an exception rule 
for my server but I am not too hopeful.

As a backup: I guess that there is no way to make sure that you don't 
try to connect to unrouted IPs, given that the IPs owner can decide to 
route or not route at will, right?

If both don't work I will not be able to run the script.

Best,

Paul Görgen

On 15.01.2014 23:23, Paul Görgen wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Apparently even with the lowered rate from time to time the abuse system
> will complain.
>
> I just received an abuse message from Hetzner even though now running
> with the reduced rate. Just so you know. Next time this happens I will
> try to escalate the problem by not solving it in the framework of the
> automated abuse reports. Instead I will put the info about what I do
> into the trouble ticket of the abuse message and put a strong plea to
> contact me about if and how they can stop flagging it as abuse.
>
> Best regards
>
> Paul
>
> On 15.01.2014 16:41, irregulator at riseup.net wrote:
>> On 01/15/2014 07:00 AM, Anupam Das wrote:
>>> Hi Alex,
>>>
>>> We are very sorry to hear about the problems our measurements caused. Up
>>> until yesterday, we had received no reports of them triggering these
>>> kinds of responses from providers. However, yesterday we heard a very
>>> similar story from another relay operator using Hetzner.
>>>
>>> Thanks for sharing your experience with the tor-relays community. We
>>> have also updated our FAQ to inform contributors about this potential
>>> problem.
>>>
>>> Also, we'd like to help others avoid this while still providing useful
>>> measurements, if possible. Have you gotten any feedback from Hetzner
>>> about what rule was triggered and maybe how to avoid it? Do you have any
>>> ideas about how one might stay below their radar? If it is something
>>> simple like reducing the measurement rate that would be a great option
>>> to prevent problems while still providing valuable data about the the
>>> Tor network.
>>>
>>> We do still hope that most relay operators will be willing to give this
>>> project a shot. We have received data from over 90 separate IP addresses
>>> and have gotten 2 negative reports so far, although certainly the issues
>>> could be more widespread without us being aware. We don't want to add to
>>> the headaches that can result from running a Tor relay, but on the other
>>> hand Tor relay operators are probably pretty adept at handling this kind
>>> of stuff.
>>>
>>> Thanks
>>>
>>> Anupam
>>>
>>>
>>
>> Hi again,
>>
>> Anupam I wish I knew how to run the script and avoid any complaints from
>> Hetzner. Unfortunately Hetzner didn't give us any helpful info. We even
>> asked them explicitly if rate limiting would be a solution, but there
>> was no answer on that.
>>
>> On 01/15/2014 02:20 PM, Paul Görgen wrote:
>>> Finally scamper was defunct, presumably due to being stopped  two times,
>>> so I restarted the whole Trusted Tor Traceroutes script on monday with
>>> PPS=200 (reducing the traceroute rate to 1/5 of the default value). So
>>> far I did not receive any machine generated abuse reports. I assume the
>>> packet rate is now below the limit of what the monitoring thinks is a
>>> netscan. I will report back if I should receive another abuse report
>>> connected to the experiment.
>>
>> Paul's answer may indicate that imposing a rate limit to the script's
>> requests might do the trick.
>>
>> Greetings.
>> Alex
>>
>>
>>
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>>
>

-- 
Paul Görgen
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