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Re: [tor-relays] Tor Guard Relay



On 2018-06-07 14:08, Keifer Bly wrote:
Thanks. How much bandwidth and uptime do I need to become a guard relay?

Sent from my iPhone

Bandwidth requirments:

A guard is the first relay in the chain of 3 relays building a Tor circuit. A middle relay is neither a guard nor an exit, but acts as the second hop between the two. To become a guard, a relay has to be stable and fast (at
least 2MByte/s) otherwise it will remain a middle relay.

Source: https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/TorRelayGuide

For the "Stable" flag:

"Stable" -- A router is 'Stable' if it is active, and either its Weighted MTBF is at least the median for known active routers or its Weighted MTBF corresponds to at least 7 days. Routers are never called Stable if they are running a version of Tor known to drop circuits stupidly. (0.1.1.10-alpha
  through 0.1.1.16-rc are stupid this way.)

Source: https://gitweb.torproject.org/torspec.git/tree/dir-spec.txt

Looking that you have Charter as your ISP, and Charter is a cable ISP, upstream speeds are usually limited. This means that unless your cable company gives at least 16 megabits of upload speed, you cannot become a guard. Also, many parts of the US have cable broadband, but not fiber, so they're stuck with slow upload speeds for now, and if they want to be a Tor relay, may not have the Guard flag unless they have a higher speed package hopefully with enough upload bandwidth (and it may only be between 16-35 mbps upload).

CableLabs (who maintains DOCSIS, the standard for cable modems) is working on a new technology called Full Duplex DOCSIS 3.1 which supposedly makes cable broadband have similar upload speeds to fiber connections.

Source: https://www.cablelabs.com/full-duplex-docsis/

Sadly, it's not a reality yet, so for a few more years you'll probably have to live with slow upload speeds until it comes (provided that cable companies deploy full duplex tech).

If you really want the Guard flag right now, another option is to get an unmetered VPS. Some networks like OVH, Online.net/Scaleway, Hetzner, and Digital Ocean are very popular for relays and many in the Tor community consider that new relays should avoid "popular" networks.

Two good VPS providers to consider include ITL and BuyVM (I have two VPSes each with both for exits). You could also look at other unmeterd providers like Contabo and Trabia as well.

You could also check if your phone company or another provider (like Google) has fiber in your area, but considering that you're in the US, many Americans have cable as their only high speed option (because most telcos refuse to deploy fiber).

Hope this helps.

-Neel Chauhan

===

https://www.neelc.org/

On Jun 7, 2018, at 5:39 AM, Neel Chauhan <neel@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

The guard flag gets automatically assigned to you if you have enough bandwidth and uptime. You usually don't get to choose. You can still influence it by inducing downtime or limiting bandwidth (but both will be counterproductive). There are no risks in being a guard node, unlike being an exit. That's why web hosts are okay with guard nodes but not exits, and also why you can be a guard node on a broadband connection without getting complaints from your ISP. Abuse complaints don't go to a guard node, it goes to exits as exits connect directly to requested non-onion websites and guards don't.

-Neel Chauhan

===

https://www.neelc.org/

On 2018-06-06 14:42, Keifer Bly wrote:
Hello, I have one question.
I have been running my relay “torland” at
http://torstatus.blutmagie.de/router_detail.php?FP=db1af6477bb276b6ea5e72132684096eee779d30
For roughly 3 months now (I am unsure exactly how many days). While my
relay is marked “fast” and “stable” currently, it has never
been marked as a “guard” relay. I believe being a “guard”
relay requires at least 10mb/s for relay speed, but am wondering, do I
need to configure my torrc file to allow it to be used as a guard
relay and are there any risks for doing this (like there are in
running in exit relay)? Thank you.
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