[tor-relays] Raspberry Pi Relay Node Performance and future Plans on Documentation and more

[Gordon Morehouse]

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Roman Mamedov:
> On Wed, 14 Aug 2013 10:47:42 -0700 (PDT) Lance Hathaway
> <qhltx at yahoo.com> wrote:
> 
>> Speaking only for myself (in turn), this is something I would
>> desperately like to see. I've been planning on deploying several
>> Raspberry Pis for Tor, but seeing all the reports on storms and
>> routers crashing and etc. has demonstrated that it's just not
>> ready for prime time yet--unless you go into all the debugging
>> and manual tweaking required.
> 
> Get an Allwinner A20-based Cubieboard or Marsboard instead. While
> somewhat more expensive, those sport twice more of three to six
> _times_ faster RAM, dual CPU cores with each of those cores by
> itself being more than twice faster than the RPi core. And this
> being ARMv7, you can use the standard Debian or Ubuntu with their
> repos directly (although still need a non-official 
> installer/image).
> 
> http://cubieboard.org/ 
> http://www.hotmcu.com/marsboard-a20-dev-board-p-60.html

I'm actually experimenting with an A20 Cubieboard for running more
heavyweight anti-censorship software (i.e. Freenet and I2P).

While the specs blow the doors off the Pi, and the Cubie would likely
run Tor without complaint, you will find a couple things about the
Cubieboard 2:

* Debian wheezy ('stable') is not stable on it.  It's got issues.
* I, personally, know the Pi is capable of being a useful relay up to
  maybe 5Mbps, it just needs tuning - and the cheaper "Torbian"[1]
  boxes are, the more homes they'll make it into.

[1] http://www.torbian.org/  (currently just redirects to a github for
      the purpose of beginning to organize/build a number of bulletproof
      Pi-based tor relay stuff)

Best,
- -Gordon M.

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