[tor-talk] Running a Tor node on a Rasberry Pi

[Chris Dagdigian]

I'm running a tor exit on a very new Raspberry Pi B+ node and I just 
posted a message about it here 2 days ago wondering if it was perhaps 
under powered for the job.

Here are my quick thoughts:

1: I'm still trying to prove if the Pi is underpowered. I got the 
'stable' flag back and now I'm starting to think it was either a glitch 
or perhaps the Pi can't handle dual duty running both Tor and the arm 
monitoring tool 24x7. Load goes down appreciably when I quit 'arm'.  The 
node has earned stable/exit/valid/fast/hs2dir etc. flags but it's only 
been online for a short time. One reason I think it may still be 
underpowered is that it's averaging about 1Mb/sec up and down despite my 
bandwidth limit settings being quite a bit higher. If the Pi turns out 
to be underpowered I'll put new hardware in

For your other questions

- It's very easy to get a distribution running on the Pi. Just look at 
http://www.raspbian.org/ -- there is an installer image linked off of 
that site --  if you drop it onto your flash card the system will boot, 
install and auto configure itself all automatically via DHCP with no 
human interaction. About 12 minutes after you power the thing on you 
have a usable debian based system

- I could not easily find/use the debs that everybody talked about so I 
just built tor from source. It was trivially easy to do and built 
without errors

Long story short -- getting a usable distribution on the PI is easy, 
compiling Tor on the Pi is easy and my only longer term worry is that 
the hardware itself is not powerful enough for my own particular use 
case (tor exit node on a somewhat decent business-class broadband circuit).


> silence_eternal at hush.ai <mailto:silence_eternal at hush.ai>
> December 25, 2014 at 9:45 PM
> I've been very interested recently with this idea of running a Tor
> server on one of these.A Raspberry Pi is a great little computer, and
> cheap as well, going for only around $40 for a Model B with a micro
> usb power cable and a micro sd card.With its low power draw and size,
> it has great potential for an unobtrusive Tor server you can simply
> keep in a cabinet or a small dyi case.I would love to be able to use
> it to run a Tor relay or exit node. However, I'm not as able with
> compiling and scripting as many of you, so I cannot easily do this.
> I would like to be able to have a distribution that could run on one
> of these RPi's. That would entail a very low usage of resources and
> compatible with an ARM processor.It wouldn't need any services or
> processes such as web browsing or even a GUI (but it would be handy
> for debugging).SSH would be wonderful so one could control it from
> their desktop (or even phone!)I would simply like to be able to image
> the distro onto a micro sd card, plug it into the RPi, and boot
> it.And, without any further user action, the RPi would start the Tor
> node.
> Now I understand there is already some packages already that do some
> of these.
> Tor-ramdisk (http://opensource.dyc.edu/tor-ramdisk) is a nice little
> Tor server that live-boots into RAM. However, I believe it requires
> some user interaction to set up on boot.Also, there aren't any
> versions that work with ARM processor architecture. I've emailed the
> creator and talked with him about porting it to ARM and I believe he
> is working on it.
> I recently just heard about the Cipollini project
> (https://github.com/gordon-morehouse/cipollini).This build seems to be
> more of what I'm looking for, but I haven't exactly figured out how to
> use it.Its also currently in the pre-alpha stages.
> Can anyone give me any help/tips/comments/feedback on resources or
> ideas or such?I would greatly appreciate it.