I previously wrote about running my SE Linux Play Machine over Tor [1] which involved configuring ssh to use Tor.
Since then I have installed a Tor hidden service for ssh on many systems I run for clients. The reason is that it is fairly common for them to allow a server to get a new IP address by DHCP or accidentally set their firewall to deny inbound connections. Without some sort of VPN this results in difficult phone calls talking non-technical people through the process of setting up a tunnel or discovering an IP address. While I can run my own VPN for them I don’t want their infrastructure tied to mine and they don’t want to pay for a 3rd party VPN service. Tor provides a free VPN service and works really well for this purpose.
As I believe in giving back to the community I decided to run my own Tor relay. I have no plans to ever run a Tor Exit Node because that involves more legal problems than I am willing or able to deal with. A good overview of how Tor works is the EFF page about it [2]. The main point of a “Middle Relay” (or just “Relay”) is that it only sends and receives encrypted data from other systems. As the Relay software (and the sysadmin if they choose to examine traffic) only sees encrypted data without any knowledge of the source or final destination the legal risk is negligible.
Running a Tor relay is quite easy to do. The Tor project has a document on running relays [3], which basically involves changing 4 lines in the torrc file and restarting Tor.
If you are running on Debian you should install the package tor-geoipdb to allow Tor to determine where connections come from (and to not whinge in the log files).
ORPort [IPV6ADDR]:9001
If you want to use IPv6 then you need a line like the above with IPV6ADDR replaced by the address you want to use. Currently Tor only supports IPv6 for connections between Tor servers and only for the data transfer not the directory services.
Data Transfer
I currently have 2 systems running as Tor relays, both of them are well connected in a European DC and they are each transferring about 10GB of data per day which isn’t a lot by server standards. I don’t know if there is a sufficient number of relays around the world that the share of the load is small or if there is some geographic dispersion algorithm which determined that there are too many relays in operation in that region.