[tor-relays] Running a relay at home

[Conrad Rockenhaus]

On Friday, March 2, 2018 2:22:00 PM CST George wrote:
> Matthew Finkel:
> > On Fri, Mar 02, 2018 at 03:01:31PM -0500, Roger Dingledine wrote:
> >> On Fri, Mar 02, 2018 at 07:42:11PM +0000, Matthew Finkel wrote:
> >>> Are you running this relay at your home? If yes, then that is not
> >>> recommended, but
> >> 
> >> For the record, it's running *exit* relays at home that is not
> >> recommended. Running non-exit relays at home is typically fine -- the
> >> most likely problems are that some overzealous blacklist will put your
> >> IP address on their list, making some websites not work so well for you
> >> if you also use that IP address for your own traffic. Some of these
> >> overzealous blacklists are just being stupid, because they don't
> >> understand about exit policies:
> >> https://www.torproject.org/docs/faq#ExitPolicies
> >> but others of them are intentionally trying to harm people who are
> >> trying to support Tor:
> >> http://paulgraham.com/spamhausblacklist.html
> > 
> > Just for the record, this is exactly why I don't recommend it from my
> > exerience. I lost access to my bank's website (plus some other sites)
> > for a while because I did this. It's must less risky running a non-exit
> > than running an exit, but there may be unintended side effects that make
> > the experience less fun overall for the operator.
> 
> +1 on that.
> 
> With the direction things are moving (. . .), I tend to think avoiding
> the possibility of residential IPs being blacklisted is a smart move.
> Run a bridge at home, and install a pluggable transport.
> 
> I was first aware of non-exit Tor IPs being blacklisted by a bank
> several years ago in Latin America... in a country which, at that point,
> had few relays.
> 
> It's good node operator practices IMHO.  Being blacklisted on a
> residential connection is a bad gateway into the relay operator club.
> 
> g

Other than running a bridge at home, if you would like to run a relay or exit, 
there are many VPS providers or even present Relay operators that operate 
their own private clouds that will be more than willing to let you run tor on 
a VPS or VM for a small monthly fee.

Also, once I'm done with the final stage of a project I'm working on,, several 
of us on this list are going to start working on the reboot of the AWS relay 
project, which takes advantage of the AWS free tier rules. You could look into 
running a relay on AWS and making sure your relay only runs within the free 
tier rules, but make sure you only run a relay on AWS and not an exit.

Regards,

Conrad
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