[tor-relays] Thoughts on new relay

[Moritz Bartl]

Hi Niklas,

Way cool!

There is no golden rule on when to turn a relay into a bridge or vice
versa. Does the relay have a dynamic IP? Do you lose connectivity
regularly, for longer periods? From the graph it looks like a nice,
stable relay that has just not been up long enough to attract enough
usage, and the only thing it needs at the moment is patience. It can
take a relay a couple of weeks to reach its full potential. You might
like the "lifecycle of a Tor relay" blog post for some explanations [1].

If I were you, I would just wait a while longer. We cannot know for sure
because there has been too little investigation into how exactly
geographical diversity influences diversity. We do know that diversity
is good for the anonymity properties of Tor, and that geographical
location plays quite a role, both legally and technically. For more
information, you might want to start with the excellent "Users get
routed" paper. [2] It would make me very happy to see this relay around
for longer, and not have it "disappear to become a random bridge" just yet.

Should you ever run into legal trouble in Cambodia because of this (I
have no feeling how they feel about anonymity, now or in the years to
come), remember that you can contact us for help. We can try to arrange
lawyers, pay bribes, etc, whatever helps. ;-)

Once you max out your connection, please let me know also. We can then
see whether it makes sense for us to pay for additional capacity.

If you think it is theoretically possible to run exits there, and you
can find an ISP that is willing to do it, but don't want to take the
risks, we can also discuss if it would be possible for Torservers.net to
legally run it instead of you.

Thanks!

Moritz

[1] https://blog.torproject.org/blog/lifecycle-of-a-new-relay
[2] http://freehaven.net/anonbib/#ccs2013-usersrouted

On 02/10/2015 02:03 PM, Niklas Femerstrand wrote:
> Moin,
> 
> Our relay is online as of Jan 23 and recently I've been thinking about
> pivoting it into a bridge instead. The relay lives in Cambodia and may
> naturally be a bit off from the rest of the network (latency).
> 
> Consensus weight is steadily increasing despite various initial
> downtime incidents, which you can see in Atlas graphs. (We've had some
> network upgrades and during a separate event even had a monkey yanking
> the eth from the nic.)
> 
> Currently we advertise 435.66 KB/s and with our current ~9d 10h uptime
> we have downloaded 3.6 GB resp uploaded 3.7 GB. Theoretically our
> tubes fit 10 Mbps download and 30 Mbps upload.
> 
> The question is whether the relay is worth keeping with its current
> setup or if we can contribute more by re-configuring into a bridge.
> Unfortunately it is very risky for us to allow exit traffic, but we <3
> any cipher packet.
> 
> Please advice!
> https://atlas.torproject.org/#details/94F806110B23E727AE8BAD74DD95B0EE0B7A8EEC
> 
> Regards,
> 
> King Kong
> 
> _______________________________________________
> tor-relays mailing list
> tor-relays at lists.torproject.org
> https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-relays
> 

-- 
Moritz Bartl
https://www.torservers.net/


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