Title: Tor part 4: run a relay | |
Author: Solène | |
Date: 08 November 2018 | |
Tags: unix tor | |
Description: | |
In this fourth Tor article, I will _quickly_ cover how to run a Tor | |
relay, the | |
Tor project already have a very nice and up-to-date Guide for setting a | |
relay. | |
Those relays are what make Tor usable, with more relay, Tor gets more | |
bandwidth | |
and it makes you harder to trace, because that would mean more traffic | |
to | |
analyze. | |
A relay server can be an **exit node**, which will relay Tor traffic to | |
the | |
outside. This implies a lot of legal issues, the Tor project foundation | |
offers | |
to help you if your exit node gets you in trouble. | |
Remember that being an exit node is **optional**. Most relays are not | |
exit | |
nodes. They will either relay traffic between relays, or become a | |
**guard** | |
which is an entry point to the Tor network. The guard gets the request | |
over | |
non-tor network and send it to the next relay of the user circuit. | |
Running a relay requires a lot of CPU (capable of some crypto) and a | |
huge | |
amount of bandwidth. Running a relay requires at least a bandwidth of | |
10Mb/s, | |
this is a minimal requirement. If you have less, you can still run a | |
bridge | |
with obfs4 but I won't cover it here. | |
When running a relay, you will be able to set a daily/weekly/monthly | |
traffic | |
limit, so your relay will stop relaying when it reach the quota. It's | |
quiet | |
useful if you don't have unmeasured bandwidth, you can also limit the | |
bandwidth | |
allowed to Tor. | |
To get real-time information about your relay, the software Nyx | |
(net/nyx) is a | |
Tor top-like front end which show Tor CPU usage, bandwidth, | |
connections, log in | |
real time. | |
[The awesome Official Tor | |
guide](https://blog.torproject.org/new-guide-running-tor-relay) |