[tor-talk] Tor Relay Smartphone App

Jeff Burdges burdges at gmail.com
Mon Oct 13 02:49:44 UTC 2014


Adafruit’s Onion Pi is a Tor proxy for your home network, *not* a relay.  

Jeff

p.s.  Instructables has relay setup instructions though, which someone could comment on, but the wolrd has a lot more Android machines that Raspberry Pis, and they’ve much less bandwidth. 




On 12 Oct 2014, at 19:53, I <beatthebastards at inbox.com> wrote:

> Isis,
> 
> Why, then, has there been discussion of the use of Raspberry Pis without mention of this?
> What is the minimum and best low power single board computer that would not be detrimental to TOR?
> If clear statements were made on Torproject.org rather than the ping pong on the list I feel it would give people a better chance to get started in TOR without first lurking and unscrambling jargon and cryptic comments.
> 
> Rob
> 
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: isis at torproject.org
>> Sent: Sun, 12 Oct 2014 21:32:22 +0000
>> To: tor-talk at lists.torproject.org
>> Subject: Re: [tor-talk] Tor Relay Smartphone App
>> 
>> Casey Rodarmor transcribed 2.0K bytes:
>>> What is the minimum bandwidth/latency that a node requires in order for
>>> it
>>> to benefit the network? I read here* that 100 kilobytes/s each way would
>>> be
>>> enough, which I imagine many phones are capable of handling, and
>>> represent
>>> a small fraction of a wifi network's bandwidth.
>>> 
>>> *https://www.torproject.org/docs/tor-doc-relay.html.en
>>> 
>> 
>> Hello Casey,
>> 
>> We're currently discussing that the above page should be updated to about
>> 250KB/s. [0]
>> 
>> The problem is this: All clients fetch information about all the relays
>> in the
>> network from the Directory Authorities/Mirrors, and these fetches take up
>> a
>> certain amount of bandwidth. If the relay is too slow, the bandwidth
>> provided
>> by that relay does not compensate for the directory fetching bandwidth
>> used to
>> tell people about the relay, and thus it is actively harming the network.
>> 
>> Additionally, since Tor processes are normally CPU-bound, most relays
>> aren't
>> able to use all their available bandwidth with a single Tor process.
>> Running a
>> relay on ARM (or likely any other mobile/low power) CPU will only further
>> limit how much traffic your relay is actually pushing.
>> 
>> Additionally, if you're attempting to do this with Orbot on an Android
>> device,
>> you'll run into issues with Android's process management system and the
>> Tor
>> process randomly dying unexpectedly. This means that you are providing an
>> unreliable, flapping relay which is actively messing up other people's
>> connections through the Tor network.
>> 
>> For the full thread where Mike Perry, myself, and other Tor developers
>> are
>> discussing the details of how badly slow relays mess up the network, see
>> [0].
>> 
>> 
>> [0]:
>> https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-dev/2014-September/007558.html
>> 
>> --
>> ♥Ⓐ isis agora lovecruft
>> _________________________________________________________
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> 
> 
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