7
votes
Accepted
Is it possible to setup a private TOR relay
I would think a bridge could be considered a private relay. You can even setup the bridge so it is not broadcast to the bridge authority. In that setup you would be the only person able to give out ...
- 283
5
votes
First node always the same! Is that how it's supposed to work?
This is the normal behaviour for entry guards.
The Tor FAQ explains why we'd want to do this:
... But profiling is, for most users, as bad as being traced all the
time: they want to do ...
- 3,135
5
votes
Accepted
How to shut down a Tor relay
The default systemd/upstart script should handle a shutdown properly.
The only thing that special about a relay shutdown is that there is a grace period of 30 secs to avoid tearing down short-lived ...
- 1,342
4
votes
First node always the same! Is that how it's supposed to work?
This is your "Entry Guard", it acts as a protection mechanism. It is kept long term because it makes it harder for adversaries to deanonymize Tor users, since most of the attacks on onion routing ...
- 10.9k
4
votes
Accepted
Nodes from Japan showing up as from Netherlands?
IP geolocation is generally not an exact science, and similar anomalies have been discussed before: Why does hard coded node 'Faravahar' have a different geolocation (USA) than registrar (...
- 3,135
4
votes
Accepted
What is the most appropriate kind of hardware to run a Tor relay on?
TL;DR:
Tor does not make much use of more than one core, two cores (or one hyperthreaded core) per process is best
a maximum of two Tor processes may register from a single IP, so a CPU with 4 cores ...
- 323
4
votes
Accepted
Setting up non-exit Tor relay on Linux Debian Stretch
This sounds like a general monitoring question. To figure out if everything is running smoothly you should take a look at the tor log:
tail -f /var/log/tor/log
If Tor is succesfully running as a ...
- 156
4
votes
Accepted
Atlas and Globe shows my country not
With Atlas you can use the search term country:at to see only relays from Austria. However if there are more than 40 results Atlas won't show you any results. So you need to refine your search. ...
- 8,561
4
votes
What is the point of a relay family?
"Why would I want to set this field?"
Because you're a good relay operator and therefor you don't "know" your relays are "clean" with certainty [sufficiently advanced ...
- 10.9k
4
votes
Routing Bittorrent through a Tor relay...
my thinking is that having all this Tor relay traffic co-mingling with the BitTorrent traffic would make any sort of traffic analysis of my Internet much more complicated.
Not in any meaningful way, ...
- 10.9k
4
votes
Accepted
How do I set up a Tor relay as a docker container?
Foreword
Docker defines a container as a "A standardized unit of software" [1] and does in a nutshell provide the tooling needed to create self-contained containers - think of little neatly-...
3
votes
Recent drop in Tor clients?
This is a known issue with Tor metrics that shouldn't occur anymore. What happened was that partial data for a given date was included in the graph generation. When you look at the metrics website now,...
- 2,219
3
votes
Does Tor insert random delays or perform packet re-ordering to make the discovery of the communication path harder?
@Jens's answer has a great description of current Tor. The Tor-Browser adds some additional defenses, namely:
it enables HTTP pipelining, so that several requests can be sent on the same "batch"
it ...
- 387
3
votes
Accepted
Preferred terms for Tor relay positions
"Guard node|relay", "entry node|relay", or "entry guard" are used interchangeably, but I believe this is actually a conflation of two different ideas.
It's possible to turn off the use of guard nodes ...
- 3,135
3
votes
Accepted
Where does tor look for directory servers?
Found it.tor creates a directory .tor in the home directory (on Linux).
$ ls ~/.tor
cached-certs cached-microdesc-consensus cached-microdescs cached-microdescs.new lock state
$ grep -Rn 193.11....
- 345
3
votes
Accepted
What if a powerful adversary controls a lot of relays?
I'm no expert, but here's what I know:
Guards/Relays
If an adversary sets up multiple relay servers around the world, all they would get is a bunch of encrypted traffic. In fact, they'd actually be ...
- 1,239
3
votes
Accepted
How often can I / should I restart my new Tor relay?
You can restart it for sure - once a day is no problem! I've tried to run it many days straight and with restarts - same result in flags. And it's a correct flagging behaviour : the relays must not be ...
- 5,900
3
votes
Accepted
Multiple Tor relays vs one bigger relay on one connection
You can only run two relays per IP address (as I understand it, anything published after that will overwrite one of the older ones).
Tor doesn't currently handle multithreading crypto operations, as ...
- 10.9k
3
votes
What is the point of a relay family?
Think about this instead from the perspective of the Tor Project.
Say you're a dev and you notice that a bunch of nodes that appear to be operated by the same person, but they aren't grouped together ...
- 231
3
votes
Restarting a tor relay. Does it go back to phase one?
No. Your relay will lose some of its flags if it's offline for a period of time, but simply restarting doesn't seem to affect its consensus status.
I'm not sure if the consensus deteriorates if your ...
- 1,239
3
votes
Accepted
tor relay and bridge on one server with two IP addresses
You'd need to run two Tor instances, one for the published relay and the other for the bridge.
The important part will be in specifying the correct IP address to bind to and listen on for the ...
- 10.9k
3
votes
Accepted
Run TOR relay with ipv6 only ("DualStack Lite")
You are right, it will not work. You need to have an ipv4 address. Only (full) dual-stack provides both ipv6 and ipv4.
DualStack Lite (very common in Germany) means you have only a native ipv6 ...
- 156
3
votes
Accepted
Diverse doubts about Tor relays
But can I configure the "ORPort" field with any other port?
Yes. This is arbitrary, 443 can be useful for some users behind weak censorship or firewalls but ultimately the choice of port is entirely ...
- 10.9k
3
votes
Is it possible to voluntarly unlist a relay from consensus?
Remove the tor instances your not using so there gone and not just hibernating. There is no way to remove them your self from the consensus. They will automaticly dissapear after about a week of no ...
- 141
3
votes
How can an external observer detect if a malicious relay does excessive logging?
There is no way short of the hypothetical attacks you mentioned to determine if a relay is excessively logging. Excessive logging is a criterion for considering a relay malicious but that doesn't mean ...
- 205
2
votes
First node always the same! Is that how it's supposed to work?
It's about pre-seeding, so what I'm recommending to people :
At first, use default setup and well-known working connection and run Tor with directory mirror enabled and seed it
Later you can do if ...
- 5,900
2
votes
First node always the same! Is that how it's supposed to work?
The first of the three relays in the circuit is called the entry guard.
The entry guard will stay the same for a period of time (several months - this is called the rotation period), even when you ...
- 3,135
2
votes
Run Tor in the background via the shell
In the torrc file set RunAsDaemon 1.
and after uncomment this ControlPort 9051
and #HashedControlPassword after no message of error in arm.
Only top scored, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible