New user question about Directory mirroring & bittorent

[Ashton Vaz]

> If I put in MaxAdvertisedBandwidth what does this do exactly.  I had 
> assumed that tor already

I assumed that BandwidthRate & BandwidthBurst are for your local Tor 
instance's knowledge & MaxAdvertisedBandwidth is what is broadcast to 
the network.

I kept MaxAdvertisedBandwidth the same as my BandwidthRate as I wasn't 
clear about this either - I have a slow machine & didn't want a high CPU 
load due to Tor - which is what it seems to ensure.  Perhaps a developer 
can better explain this option?

> On my ADSL line my ISP does no filtering except port 25 and no 
> throttling and no caps.  So I don't need to worry about max 
> bandwidth.  I decided to change BandwidthRate to 30KB and

Many ISPs take a "we're free to change our policy at any time" policy.  
Mine certainly did.  I received no email, call or letter stating that 
they were implementing the bandwidth cap.  I found out through a friend 
that works for them.  Unless you're certain that they will contact you 
before they change their policy, it might be a good idea to implement 
bandwidth accounting, so that you can install Tor & not worry about it.

Since they do no filtering, if you're allowed to run a webserver, you 
may want to also change your ORPort is 443 & your DirPort is 80 
(according to the wiki - this helps people that can't visit ports other 
than well known ports - in this case HTTPs & HTTP)

Ashton