[tor-relays] New tor relay, some questions

[Tobias Markus]

Hi,

sorry for replying rather late!

In response to 1): Thinking about it, I think the main (possible)
problem is that my MTA is rejected by SMTP servers it connects to
because of a Tor blacklist. Is this probable? Has someone got
experience running a complete mail system and a (public) Tor relay on
the same host/IP?

About 2): That is indeed very unfortunate, but at the same time a reason
to start contributing to Tor! (Sadly, I am presently occupied by various
other projects, but I think Tor is definitely worth a 'visit'.)

Now about something else. I recently had to restart my server for
unrelated reasons. (The relay had the Guard and Stable flag at that
time.) I sadly forgot to add the Tor service to the default runlevel, so
it was not started at boot time. I went to bed thinking everything was
OK and was only able to start Tor about 12 hours later. Unfortunately,
my relay got no flags since then -- not even "Running"!
The Tor consensus website confirms this: Three Auths voted for all
previous/normal flags except Guard, the others only for Valid and V2Dir
leading to my relay getting no flags! I cannot really explain this to
myself. What is going on here?

Tobias

On Sun, Mar 02, 2014 at 07:32:17PM +0100, Moritz Bartl wrote:
> On 03/02/2014 04:06 PM, Tobias Markus wrote:
> > I've been running a new tor relay for about a week now
>
> Great. Thank you!
>
> > 1) I plan on running other services than tor on my server, including a
> > (private) mail system. Other than the general possibility of tor having
> > security holes and my server (and its IP address) being public and thus
> > possibly target of attacks, are there security implications I should
> > consider?
>
> Unfortunately, many sites block Tor relay IPs regardless of their exit
> policy. So, if you share one IP between the relay and other services,
> your might be impacted. This is especially true for exit relays.
>
> > 2) I would be interested to eventually run a directory/bandwith
> > authority, so I read about them in [1] and [2], but the places seemed a
> > bit odd (hidserv-perf branch in tor svn/torflow repo) so I thought I
> > better ask here: Would I really just have to follow the steps in [1]
> > to become a dirauth? Is there currently a need for auths, would
> > contribution be welcomed?
>
> The offer is well appreciated. In the current design, directory
> authorities and bandwidth authorities play a very special role. There
> are several ideas on how to improve the situation and then open
> participation to the broader community, but for the time being,
> authorities can only be run by people very close to the core dev team.