[tor-relays] Unwarranted discrimination of relays with dynamic IP

[Matt Traudt]

On 12/04/2016 10:39 AM, Rana wrote:
>> For as little as $10.00 US there are VPS' with static ip's..
> 
> Attn: Kurt Besig
> 
> Well I kind o' like my Raspberry Pi that cost me $40 including box and power supply and SD card and door to door delivery, with far more horsepower and memory than needed for running Tor relay, and my free and absolutely stable 1.5mbps that I want to donate to Tor courtesy of my ISP, and my transparent Tor proxy and my hidden service  and my wireless access point that lurk on the same Pi. 
> 
> This is not a good reason to punish my relay. Makes ZERO sense to me and to who knows how many people like me whose relays are flushed down the drain by the current DirAuth algorithms.
> 
> I can think of many an Iranian or Turkish or Chinese or Russian dissident who could use 1.5 mbps bandwidth to communicate with the free world.
> 
> 
> 

Perhaps all that other stuff you have running on the Pi is hurting your
ability to max out your connection.

In any case, as I mentioned on your Reddit post a week or so ago, just
because you have X available bandwidth, doesn't mean Tor will be able to
use all X. I have some relays on 10 Gbps links. Even if they were only 1
Gbps links, the max traffic I'm seeing right now is about 65 Mbps. Atlas
says I'm "advertising" (been measured at) ~140 Mbps.

https://atlas.torproject.org/#search/x76slvferal

So I'm pushing roughly half that atlas says I could be, and I'm pushing
nowhere near the amount my hosting provider says my links are capable of.

I've heard (but haven't verified) that clients rarely use non-Stable
non-Fast relays. So if you are struggling to maintain those flags, then
that would be why you're having trouble getting up to 1.5 Mbps usage.

Here is how Stable is determined according to dir-spec

https://gitweb.torproject.org/torspec.git/tree/dir-spec.txt#n2267

Finally, I'd like to reiterate teor

> * a changed IP usually means a changed network with different
>   characteristics,
> * if the relay IP address changes, there's no guarantee it will
> be just as reachable or stable at the new IP,
> * stolen keys become much less valuable,
> * duplicate keys / failover strategies are discouraged.

It sounds like your IP is _too_ dynamic for best supporting the network.

Thank you for running a relay and please do not be discouraged by numbers.

Matt