[tor-relays] My Family

[Roger Dingledine]

On Sun, Jul 25, 2021 at 08:36:20AM -0500, Kathi wrote:
>   I'm running three relays. Is it necessary to list all three relays in
>   my family on each relay?

Yes, please do list them all.

The first reason is that it helps clients make safe routing decisions:
by signaling to the clients that these relays are all controlled by you,
Tor clients can make sure not to use more than one of your relays in any
of the paths they build.

The second reason is actually for *your* safety: if you are signaling to
clients to avoid using more than one of your relays in their paths, then
the temptation is lower for somebody to come hassle you into revealing
data and/or watch your network connection.

And the third reason is to help everybody know which relays are really
yours. We've had some problems over the past year with jerks trying to
run harmful relays, and one of their tricks to stay hard to notice has
been to find groups of relays that look like a family but that haven't
set up their MyFamily lines properly, and try to blend in with those. So
if you run three relays but don't set your MyFamily properly, we can't
tell the difference between that and "you run two relays and some jerk
is trying to blend their relay into your two".

Thanks for running relays!

(Oh. As Roman says in the other reply, technically there's no need to
list yourself in your MyFamily line. That is, every relay is implicitly
already in its own family. But for logistical reasons, it's probably
easier to just use the same MyFamily line for all three relays.)

--Roger