Anyone running Tor on routing/switching hardware ?

[John Case]

On Sun, 25 Oct 2009, basile wrote:

>> This is interesting:
>>
>> http://www.linux-cisco.org/index.php/Cisco_3600_Series
>>
>> It's only a R4700 with 128 MB of ram ... but they have Linux up and
>> running on it.
>>
>> Is anyone running Tor on a Cisco router, or more generally, on
>> networking infrastructure hardware of any kind ?
>>
>>

(snip)

> Close, take a look at the MIPS port of tor-ramdisk:
>
>    General Information:          http://opensource.dyc.edu/tor-ramdisk
>    MIPS Specific Information: http://opensource.dyc.edu/tor-mips-ramdisk
>
> Node "mufasa" has been running this last March I think.  Its a Mikrotik
> RB433AH which sports an Atheros AR7161 which is a MIPS processor.  If
> there is interest, I can port tor-ramdisk to other router archs.


This is a very, very slow node (46 KB/s in this mornings TorStatus) but it 
is interesting to see nonetheless - thank you.

So people are doing it, and packages exist, etc. - since my own interest 
is in private Tor networks, or possibly "virtual" private Tor networks (as 
we discussed a month or so ago on this list) I am particularly interested 
in whether there are performance advantages to be had in running Tor on 
dedicated network hardware.

Clearly not in the case of this r24k based system, but I wonder if there 
is an advantage to running Tor on larger pieces of network infrastructure 
that might have features like hardware AES and so on, vs. continuing to 
run on commodity x86 based servers.  This assumes several hundred to a 
thousand megabits/s of traffic ... otherwise, who cares.

There are some public nodes running at 100 (or so) megabits/s - I'd love 
it if someone could speak up about what that looks like on the system.  It 
might save some more of this "load" conjecture  :)
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