[tor-dev] Tor Relay Setup Wizard

[Damian Johnson]

Hi all. Over the last few weeks I've been working on a relay setup
wizard for arm. Its purpose is to make volunteering to be a relay
easy, narrowing the options to those most commonly used and giving
nice descriptions/defaults to encourage good configurations.

At present relay setup for new users, particularly exits, is either
confusing or limited. For users doing it without a controller we have
a deluge of man page options and a confusing bundle of docs. For
Vidalia users, however, it's easy to become a middle hop or bridge,
but the configurations it makes for exits are poor (default exit
policy, no front page, no notice for how to reduce abuse complaints
which probably leads Vidalia exits to be short lived...).

This wizard consists of three pages...

1. Selection for what you'd like to be
http://www.atagar.com/transfer/tmp/arm_wizard1.png

2. Picking your relay options, with both descriptions of the options
and why you'd want to set them
http://www.atagar.com/transfer/tmp/arm_wizard2.png

3. Confirmation for the configuration it's making
http://www.atagar.com/transfer/tmp/arm_wizard3.png

4. ... then in the frozen land of Nador they were forced to eat Sir
Robin's minstrels. And there was much rejoicing.
http://www.atagar.com/transfer/tmp/arm_wizard4.png

My not-so-humble goals for this wizard is for it to become a method we
suggest on the site for setting up an exit (and maybe relays/bridges
too later) so I'd appreciate some feedback! The 1.4.3 release
candidate is available at...
http://www.atagar.com/transfer/tmp/arm-1.4.3rc.tar.bz2

Future plans are automatic signup for Tor Weather and a "Run Tor at
Startup" option (this later one is gonna be tricky, but it's vital if
we want systems like laptops that frequently shut down to be
meaningful relays/bridges).

Cheers! -Damian