[tor-relays] Tor relay making normal internet unusable

[Roger Dingledine]

On Wed, Aug 30, 2017 at 09:33:26AM +0930, W Howard wrote:
> I have some spare bandwidth and want to run an exit relay

Is this at your home? Careful running exit relays at your home -- there
is always some new cop who just started his job, doesn't understand the
Internet, has never heard of Tor, and wants to prove how great he is at
being a cop.

See also the "Should I run an exit relay from my home?" question on
https://www.torproject.org/eff/tor-legal-faq

You might want to run a non-exit relay in that situation instead.

> buy when I
>do the normal internet is so slow

The simple option is to turn on rate limiting so it uses a little bit
less than your full Internet connection.

The more complex option is:
https://gitweb.torproject.org/tor.git/tree/contrib/operator-tools/linux-tor-prio.sh
was once a script that some people used to set the priority lower
on their Tor traffic compared to the other traffic. You need to either
run it on the router, or run it on the computer that generates both the
Tor traffic and the other traffic.

> and I have to fill out so many captcha
>that it makes it unusable!
> 
> Any ideas why? I think google etc block by default tor exit nodes. 

Yes, correct. :( That's why many people who run exit relays use a separate
IP address for them.

See also
https://blog.torproject.org/blog/call-arms-helping-internet-services-accept-anonymous-users

> I was thinking about spinning up a vm and running tor on that.

Plausible!

> When I run as a bridge I don't see much traffic. Any ideas?

Many bridges don't see much traffic, especially compared to fast
relays. See also
https://www.torproject.org/docs/faq#RelayOrBridge

Thanks!
--Roger