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Re: [tor-talk] Tor relay on small and cheap devices



On Sun, 20 Jan 2013 16:28:13 -0800
Mike Perry <mikeperry@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> Thus spake Okhin (okhin@xxxxxxxx):
> 
> > I'm currently trying to find a way to easily spread some
> > pre-configured, pre-installed devices embedding a tor-relay. And I
> > have some TP Link hardware, the smallest of them being the WR703N
> > (http://wiki.openwrt.org/toh/tp-link/tl-wr703n). Those devices are
> > cheap and handy (can actually run on battery for years,since it does
> > not consumes that much power... around 1W/h).
> 
> I hope this reply isn't too discouraging, but I'm somewhat of a
> pessimist/hater when it comes to "Let's put a Tor relay on that tiny
> computer!" projects. Sure, I guess everybody loves the endorphin rush
> from bragging that their phone/wristwatch/fridge is a Tor relay, but
> with the current limits on Tor network size, it's unlikely that the
> network could support enough of these tiny relays to actually make any
> substantial capacity difference, and they may actually harm overall
> performance rather than help it.
> 

> As it stands, directory overhead will probably become unmanageable if we
> get much more than 10k tor relays in total right now, and perhaps more
> importantly queuing theory and experimental results indicate that adding
> more slow relays will actually hurt performance more than help[1,2].
> 
> 
> I think a super-portable device that can either do transparent Tor
> proxying and/or run a hidden service for you are probably both better
> use cases for tiny hardware than a full fledged relay, especially if
> your goal is to actually have these things see real use.
> 


Thanks, exactly the kind of answers I was looking for. So, not a relay then, I'll go for a transparent proxy then.
And the entropy seems ok (at least, I need to do some tricks before generating keys, but sounds manageable from here).

Okhin

> 
> [1]. http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~sjm217/papers/pets08metrics.pdf, section 6.
> [2]. https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/1854
> 
> -- 
> Mike Perry

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