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



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 :)
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