On Jun 2, 2011, at 1:22 PM, George Gemelos wrote:
I recently had a dedicated server free up and decided to set it up as a Tor relay. It has 100Mbps unmetered traffic, so I thought it would be a good contribution. Right now I have it set up as a middle node, but I am considering possibly converting it to an exit node. Both my server and I are based in the US. I asked my hosting company about the possibility of running a Tor exit node and they said that they do not have a policy against it, but that if they get a lot of complaints they might set up and ACL on specific ports. So I really would like to reduce the probability of getting any complaints.
If it is at all possible, by far the best solution is to have abuse complaints bypass your ISP and come directly to you. To that end, it's worth asking your ISP if SWIP or RDNS services are available, and if it would be possible to set up a filter to forward all abuse complaints to you so that you might deal with them personally (See 1, 3, 4, and 5 of [1]). Personally I've had success with two ISPs by assuming the pretext of saving them the time and effort of dealing with each (unwarranted) complaint themselves.
I have heard about the reduced exit policy. What are people’s experience running with that policy? Is there a further reduced set that might be better, in the sense of avoiding complaints, and still remain useful as an exit node? Should I just leave it as a middle node? Thanks in advance for any feedback.
Most people on this list seem to have a lot of success with the "standard" reduced exit policy (6 of [1]). Generally even ISPs who are hostile to Tor will give you several warnings before shutting down service, so if reasoning with them doesn't work, you always have the option of dropping down to a middle node later on down the line.