[or-talk] Tor Server Affecting Net Access

[Sam Creasey]

On Thu, Mar 22, 2007 at 11:54:11PM -0700, brianwc at OCF.Berkeley.EDU wrote:

<snip>

> However, if the issue is simply that having a couple hundred people's tor
> traffic running on your home DSL connection just gums up the works, and
> even segregating the tor server to its own IP won't address the issue,
> then I may have to sadly stop running it as I have to keep everything else
> functioning too.  Thanks for any suggestions.

First note -- I've noticed that the IP I'm using for my exit node is
defintely blocked some places.  I've not noticed any effects on the
other IP's, so it doesn't look like anyone is going through the
insanity of knocking out whole subnets yet, but...   

Anyway, I'm assuming people are simply blocking all servers in the TOR
directory listing...  Or have people observed that non-exit nodes are
actually not being blocked?  (my point here being that you should
probably consider the additional static IP anyway...)

The IP address probably won't help your bandwidth issue though.  You
could try turning down your bandwidth rate from 75KB and see if ths
helps, but that "should" be sufficiently low to keep things from
grinding to a halt (I personally noticed that I could run apps like
bittorrent at 80+% of my home bandwidth without killing online games
and VoIP).   I'll admit the possibility that the max connections per
second issue is a problem for a home gateway... but my exit server is
on a fairly low-power machine (Linux/UltraSPARC 300mhz box), which is
actually comparable to some home routers these days in sheer MIPS. 

Call me paranoid, but I'd actually be a little concerned about
upstream traffic shaping from your ISP if they're trying to throttle
back file sharers at the like.

Ok, probably not a helpful message for troubleshooting, just my own
$0.02.

-- Sam