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Re: [tor-relays] Running gigabit relay



About having a relay on gigabit symmetrical FTTH, you don't just need a good server, you also need a good NAT router unless you want to use your server as a NAT router as well.

I don't have Sonic or Gigabit Fiber (from any ISP), but I have 300mbps symmetrical Verizon FiOS in Brooklyn, NY running a Tor middle relay. A Linksys running OpenWrt and many low-power Mini PC "firewall" boxes were a bottleneck even on 300 Mbps for Tor, despite having a powerful Xeon 4108 HPE ProLiant ML110 Gen10 and having no Verizon router in my setup. I dabbled with using my ML110 as a PF firewall (I run FreeBSD), but yesterday, I installed a HP ProDesk 400 G4 as an OPNsense firewall (because I didn't want a single point of failure, and so I can remotely access iLO).

So your firewall needs to be more powerful than an average one because at least for me Tor has ~10000 connections at once, and that is with Tor only measuring half my 300Mbps. Your Gigabit will mean far more than that running Tor. So a low power HP T620 Plus or Qotom box won't work as a firewall in this case.

My "bottleneck" could also be Verizon's peering that Sonic may not have. After all, Sonic supports Net Neutrality and Verizon opposes NN.

About the server, I have a powerful HPE ProLiant as mentioned earlier, but like other said at minimum you need a i5/i7 CPU, or an equivalent Xeon or AMD CPU. So this means no NUCs or HPE MicroServers.

-Neel

===

https://www.neelc.org/

On 2019-07-26 01:31, Mitar wrote:
Hi!

I have Sonic Fiber which offers gigabit symmetric connection. I am
thinking of using it for gigabit Tor relay, but I wonder what would be
good hardware to use for something like that. Information I have found
[1] is from 2010 so I wonder if there are any updates? Is there any
simple small box I could use? Like Intel NUC? Information here [2]
says that one can get 400 Mbps with AES-NI. And so with two processes
limit per my public IP this would be around 800 Mbps then. Is this
still a reasonable expectation? Do I have to care about the network
card to serve gigabit (besides its being nominally gigabit)? What
would be memory requirements for such a device?

[1] https://www.mail-archive.com/or-talk@xxxxxxxxxxxxx/msg14159.html
[2] https://www.torservers.net/wiki/setup/server


Mitar
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