On Mon, Jul 23, 2012 at 9:22 PM, Roger Dingledine
<arma@xxxxxxx> wrote:
Hello Andrew,
I wanted to draw your attention to a thread I've started on the tor-relays
list:
https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-relays/2012-July/001433.html
Hi Roger,
I'm not too familiar with mailing lists, so hopefully I'm not top posting or replying in the wrong place here. I'm simply replying to your email in Gmail with a CC to the tor-relays list. Sorry for the late reply, I've been away with no internet access for the past week.
In short, we have a funder who wants to sponsor more and faster Tor
exits, and we're brainstorming about how to use the money in a way that
makes the network stronger but also doesn't screw up the "community"
side of the Tor relay operator community. The first step is collecting
facts about the current fast Tor exit relays.
Great! I've not been vocal in the Tor community before now, but I'd like to start, and I'm certainly happy to share my experience / thoughts.
- What do you currently pay for hosting/bandwidth, and how much bandwidth
do you get for that?
This is a complicated question, because I run a single Tor exit in a VPS on my company dedicated server. I run a local company doing computer repair and web development, and lease a single dedicated server from OVH (more specifically, Kimsufi) for a total of £64 a month (inc. VAT). That gets me the Kimsufi 16G dedicated server, a RIPE block of 4 extra IPs, and an external 2TB HDD. 100Mbit pipe, 10TB/month bandwidth. £0.87/TB if I go over that, so if I were to max out the bandwidth for an entire month, using around 30TB traffic, I would have to pay about £18 on top for the extra bandwidth. However, according to the OVH manager I never seem to go anywhere near the traffic limit, despite having had the exit set to use 50Mbit/s constantly for the past 3 months.
As far as I'm concerned, it costs me nothing to run this exit node - my company needs the dedicated server regardless, and none of the ~50 websites I host use enough traffic to be affected by the fact that my server is using half it's available bandwidth for Tor.
In an ideal world, I would rent a second Kimsufi server just for Tor purposes, which would cost £36/month (Kimsufi 16G) + £4/month (RIPE block).
Therefore, if I were to participate in this experiment, I would say £40 GBP / month would get 10TB of 100 Mbit/s exit traffic.
Additional 20TB traffic could be purchased for £18 / month, which would bring the maximum cost to $92 USD / month.
- Is it a stable hosting situation? For example, how do they handle
abuse complaints so far?
This is an important one, because OVH are not Tor-friendly. In fact, they aren't very friendly in general! Several people told me it was very foolish to run an exit node on an OVH server, since as soon as OVH get even a whiff of a complaint, they are quick to suspend.
All my company-hosted websites are hosted on a second redundant server with another ISP so I'm not worried if OVH do find out and take that route and cut me off. I'm also not worried about legal issues, as I have positioned myself as a web-hosting customer of my own PLC, with terms and conditions absolving my PLC of any legal risks. In the off chance some legal authority were to come to my flat in britain, they would find no electrical equipment to seize as I own only a single laptop and it usually lives in my car or partners house anyway!
As I have only been running this exit for 3 months, I am far from an authoritative voice on the issue of abuse complaints, but the most important thing is definitely SWIP as far as I can see it - the IP address I use for the exit is one from the RIPE block I lease and as such the abuse email is my own.
I've had about 20 abuse report emails so far, all automated (by the looks of things) from some system within the brazilian government, following an Sqlmap SQL injection scan/attack on a few government sites. I replied to the first one with the standard template, got no reply, haven't worried about it since.
I reckon if OVH found out I was running an exit they would be likely to cut me off fairly swiftly, but they don't seem to pay much attention to Kimsufi customers since it is their budget range with very slow (week+ per ticket) support and presumably low margins. I think that and me as the primary abuse contact for the IP mean it's likely to stay up for a while. If I do get any hassle, I'll defend it as far as I can from a business perspective, but if they don't give in I'll likely just cancel it and open a new Kimsufi lease - I very much doubt anyone is checking new invoices for similar details to past customers.
- Is your hosting situation one where it could make sense for us to
reimburse your bandwidth costs? (Some people have a deal through their
employer, friend, etc where they don't pay for hosting.)
I don't think so - as explained above, at present I don't pay a penny, but I can only offer about half of my available bandwidth as the server is used for many purposes. If I were to participate in this experiment, it would probably mean purchasing another Kimsufi just for this, and the cost of the server itself would be what I would be looking for financial help with.
- Are you in a position to get more bandwidth if you pay more? At what
rates? We're most interested in sponsoring >=100mbit relays.
Unfortunately the Kimsufi servers are capped at 100Mbit regardless of whether you want to pay more. OVH obviously have Gbit and 10Gbit servers available, but they are too expensive for this.
There are obviously far better alternatives for higher bandwidth servers - a quick look tells me I could get a 1Gbit dedicated server with 100TB traffic from Leaseweb for €99 ($121) / month, so obviously if the money is there, more bandwidth and traffic can be had. I guess it boils down to how many people you can get interested in this - if plenty, lots of 100Mbit servers is presumably better than a few 10Gbit ones for the money as it aids network diversity, even if (worst case) they are all hosted by the same provider.
- Do you have other locations in mind where you would run another exit
relay if you didn't have to pay for it?
Definitely! As far as I'm concerned, I am not worried about legal issues as long as I can purchase hosting through my business and SWIP the IP, and I have plenty of free time to spend configuring servers and responding to abuse emails, so if I had the money I would happily be running exit nodes in any country I could find a hosting provider in - money is the hurdle for me.
- What else should we be asking here? :)
One thing which I haven't seen discussed yet is how funding would actually be connected with operators - I'm not sure if you were thinking about the funder(s) directly sending money to operators, or if The Tor Project Inc would be acting as a middleman? What money transfer mechanisms would be safe to use, how would you verify that the money was going to the right person, would The Tor Project Inc receive invoices directly from hosting companies or would operators email copies of invoices to someone and then some money would turn up in their bank accounts? What about PayPal, etc?
Just a few thoughts :)
Thanks!
--Roger