Best Hardware for TOR server..

F. Fox kitsune.or at gmail.com
Sat Dec 15 01:33:36 UTC 2007


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Michael Holstein wrote:
(snip)
>> all behind a  Linksys Firewall Router.
> 
> This will be a problem. Cheap-o routers don't have enough memory to
> manage huge state tables. You'd be better off getting a second NIC card
> for the PC and just using the server to firewall/NAT your LAN, in
> addition to running TOR. If that scares you, just re-use an old PC and
> run Smoothwall on it (or any of the other many "appliance" distros that
> do this).
> 

As long as the bandwidth you're passing through is relatively low, you
might get by with a custom firmware which lets you increase the size of
the conntrack state table.

Mine's a Linksys WRT54G v4, running HyperWRT+Thibor; I upped it to the
max allowed (8192 connections, 600 second timeout) without any problems
(and there's three machines behind it, one of them running virtual
machines).

Two caveats:

1.) The Linksys WRT54G v4 was the revision of that model with the most
CPU and RAM, others had less;

2.) If you're running a high-bandwidth node - and if you're not, it'd be
a waste of that nice shiny box of yours (unless you have it do other
things) - I doubt 8192 connections would do it, and you probably should
take Mr. Holstein's suggestion.

>>   My service provider will most likely be Comcast cable broadband.
>>
> 
> YMMV, but Comcrap will axe you if they know you're running servers, and
> they WILL know that if you decide to run an exit, because they'll get
> lots of complaints about it. I lost count of the number of complaints
> mine generated, but I still have copies of the various subpoenas I got (*).
(snip)

That sucks. What about if he runs a middleman node?

- --
F. Fox: A+, Network+, Security+
Owner of Tor node "kitsune"
http://fenrisfox.livejournal.com
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