[tor-mirrors] Space needed for a mirror

[Dave Warren]

On 2021-07-28 06:02, hackerncoder wrote:
>> It also occurs to me that if I were building something new today, some mechanism for tor nodes themselves to proxy http and https requests from the public internet would be relatively straightforward to implement, creating a wide network of sources for the files without requiring individual mirror operators, without replication, without disk space consumption, etc. But again, probably more trouble than it would actually be worth at this point.
> Isn't that just... kinda Tor?

It would be a bootstrapping mechanism, using Tor's strengths to help 
people who don't (yet) have access to Tor get started with plain http 
and/or https.


> Or a 1 hop through an exit node. It sounds
> good, but if we are talking censorship, that won't work.

No more or less than a public list of mirrors. And admittedly whether 
mirrors have any ongoing value or not is a part of this topic in general.

Some particularly dumb filters (literally everything DNS based, which is 
all the rage) may block torproject.org specifically but not be designed 
to block widely). And of course DNS filters can't block any direct-to-IP 
URL.

A Twitter bot or other mechanism could provide users with a URL as 
needed, or any other existing mechanism that provides mirrors today.


> And it doesn't sound like CDN or in any
> way taking load of the tpo.org servers?

If load on the torproject.org infrastructure is a factor then the tor 
nodes could cache, although that was more than I was initially thinking. 
My guess is that only a handful of files are being actively used at any 
particular moment. But this would require some sort of configuration 
knobs to allow server operators to configure how much disk space and/or 
memory they're willing to allocate, and if local caching was required 
then this would need to be disabled by default.

I don't believe the main download site has capacity problems, although I 
genuinely have no idea. If this was a significant factor, then tor nodes 
might even contact other tor nodes to pull from their cache rather than 
pulling it from somewhere central. But we're approaching recreating IPFS 
at this point, and frankly, doesn't seem like a problem that needs to be 
solved.

If torproject.org load is a concern, having tor nodes cache updates for 
torbrowser's autoupdate mechanism would probably be beneficial too.



> So I don't see what it is supposed to do.

Zero-effort dynamic mirrors that are always up to date, widely 
distributed, consuming no resources except when utilized.

Sure, tor node IPs are not secret and but neither are mirror URLs today.

To be clear, I'm not sure that this is actually useful in today's 
internet, I'm more thinking about what I would build today if there 
wasn't already a pool of mirrors and wanted to develop something new.