[tor-talk] New site attempting to help Tor grow

[social at sponsor-privacy.com]

On 2015-04-17 13:36, nusenu wrote:
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> Thanks for your effort.
> 
> - From a "customer" perspective I'm missing some crucial information on
> your website:
> - - what bandwidth (mbps or TB per month) does this relay add to the
> network? (I understand that it is hard to estimate but if the data
> plan allows only lets say 1TB per month you should make that clear)
> - - am I adding an exit or non-exit relay?
> 
> 
> More experienced "customers" might want to know:
> - - What characteristics has the relay? how much memory?
> - - Where are you going to run the sponsored relay?
> 	AS? Country? hosting provider?
> 	from your first relay: AS393406, US, Digital Ocean
> - - What OS are you going to use? (apparently Linux)
> - - Can I select location/OS/bw/.. ?
> - - Do you provide bw monitoring and traffic stats? (i.e. munin and 
> vnstat
> )
> - - Can I choose to run 2 instances per server? (which results in more
> traffic)
> 
> I understand that you might want to keep this website simple since you
> target non-technical persons but providing that information wouldn't
> hurt. It doesn't have to be on the main page.
> 
> 
> I hope you also consider the following points:
> 
> - - proper automatic MyFamily configuration on all your relays
> - - keep your relays up to date
> - - network and platform diversity (this becomes more relevant once you
> run a substantial part of the tor network)
> 	- run relays in non-top x countries/ASes/... by consensus weight
> 		https://compass.torproject.org
> 	- run non-Linux relays
> 		https://metrics.torproject.org/platforms.html
> 
> 
> Do you "pre-run" relays and rename them as soon as they are "ordered"
> to reduce the bootstrap phase?
> 
> 
> 
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Appreciate the feedback. As you noted the primary target was someone who 
might not know really what bandwidth is, how much memory, etc but I can 
see your point where some potential customers might like to have that 
information. If nothing else it might help validate the $65 cost. I'll 
try to answer some of those questions here and think about how the info 
could be integrated into the site itself.

- Bandwidth: the instances being used come with 1000TB per month. This 
has been set as the cap in the torrc file so each instance can in theory 
use all 1000TB before it stops passing traffic.

- The instances are currently being setup with DigitalOcean which does 
not allow exit relays so only non-exit relays are being created.

- Each relay is SSD based (20gigs), comes with 1 "cpu" (these are 
virtual instances) and 512mb of RAM

- Currently all instances are provisioned in the United States but the 
plans are to use every DC that DigitalOcean has available which means 
with a minor change to the code instances could also be deployed in the 
Netherlands, Germany, England and Singapore. Eventually the goal is to 
bring in other providers outside of DigitalOcean to expand the possible 
footprint.

- You are correct, the OS is Linux :)

- We do not provide any stats at this time. Something that has been 
discussed though was a possible page that showed all relays customers 
had sponsored with some bandwidth stats next to them. It would be more 
of a novelty than anything, nothing for real system type monitoring.

- As far as running two relays on one instance, that is not an option 
right now. The way it works is there is an image I created that is a 
basic Linux image with the Tor client installed. When someone sponsors a 
relay through the site an API call is made to spin up a new instance 
based on this image. During the API call some cloud-init data is passed 
to a small script on the image which handles setting up the torrc file 
with the correct relay name and contact notes. At that point a new 
fingerprint is generated and the Tor client is restarted. Since these 
are SSD based the time from payment to running is typically about a 
minute assuming everything behind the scenes at DigitalOcean is happy. 
It would certainly be possible to run two relays on a single instance 
but would introduce a bit more complexity that I'll need to look into.

- In all honesty, the MyFamily option is something that I didn't think 
would really apply to this as the goal is to never actually login to 
these boxes. I do see though how that could make people feel uneasy 
since technically SponsorPrivacy will be the "owners" of all of these. I 
will bump that to the top of the TODO list so we can start dynamically 
updating that setting as new instances are provisioned. Consider that 
the first bug :)