[tor-relays] Question On Running A Tor Bridge Relay

[Keifer Bly]

Ok. Thanks. The only computer I can run my relay on is a macos compter, and
it seems to have been doing ok for the last week or so. Perhaps that was
something unrelated my router was doing. As obfs4 seems incompatible with
macos/homebrew, I will keep running my relay as normal for now. I tried
doing a manual install and it caused the tor software to crash, leading me
to believe that will not work on MacOS for now.

I had another thought, in newest versions of tor browser, the option to use
bridges is now lables as "tor is censored in my country" where it used to
read "my isp blocks connections to the tor network". There could also be
people in uncensored countries trying to connect from networks who's
network administrator has blocked access to the tor network, it might be a
good idea to include this in the text to clear confusion. Just a thought.

On Sun, Aug 5, 2018 at 6:54 PM teor <teor at riseup.net> wrote:

>
> > On 1 Aug 2018, at 19:57, Keifer Bly <keifer.bly at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > Hi All,
> >
> > So given that I am running my relay off of a home internet router (a
> Netgear Orbi Router) I am considering switching to running an obfuscated
> bridge. I am not sure I will do this, but have noticed that when my relay
> (torland at
> >
> http://torstatus.blutmagie.de/router_detail.php?FP=db1af6477bb276b6ea5e72132684096eee779d30)
> Gets a lot of use,  this can cause my computer I am running it on to get
> hot (It is a mid 2011 iMac with 8GB Ram running Mac OS High Sierra). It
> does not happen often, but does from time to time. I have also noticed that
> not often but occasionally when my relay is running, my router will lock up
> either for a few minutes or until I restart it. I do not know if this is
> related to my relay (I checked with Netgear support and was told the
> router  is capable of about 60,000 simultaneous connections, 65,000 being
> the absolute maximum).
> >
> > The ISP is Charter Communications, and the internet speed generally
> alternates between 500-800 kb/s. I will maybe try running a bridge to cut
> down on the maximum number of connections I get, and have three questions.
> I have been running a public relay off my listed ip for some time but have
> a Dynamic IP so it should change from time to time.
> >
> >       • What would be the most helpful PT to run? Obfs4 is the one I
> would most likely choose, and what countries are these being used in the
> most?
>
> obfs4 is a good PT to run.
>
> Here is a graph of the top 10 countries:
> https://metrics.torproject.org/userstats-bridge-table.html
>
> >       • I looked on the tor website and could only find the instructions
> for installing PT on Linux at
> https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/doc/PluggableTransports/obfs4proxy.
> Is there currently a way to install the PT for Obfs4 on Mac OS High Sierra
> (this would be installed via homebrew)?
>
> You can use “brew search” in your terminal to find homebrew packages.
>
> It doesn’t look like obfs4proxy is available via homebrew:
>
> http://brewformulas.org/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&search%5Bterms%5D=obfs4proxy&button=&search%5Bnames%5D=0&search%5Bnames%5D=1&search%5Bfilenames%5D=0&search%5Bfilenames%5D=1&search%5Bdescriptions%5D=0&search%5Bdescriptions%5D=1
>
> You could try a manual install:
>
> https://gitweb.torproject.org/pluggable-transports/obfs4.git/plain/README.md
>
> >       • Would it be possible to keep my current relay fingerprint?
>
> Keeping your current relay fingerprint is a bad idea.
> It makes your bridge easier to censor, and it doesn’t help bridge users.
>
> Delete your keys and start again.
>
> T
>
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>
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