Re: Smallest cheapest device to run a tor home server?

["F. Fox" <kitsune.or@xxxxxxxxx>]

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Jonathan Addington wrote:
(much snippage)
> Personally I am running Tor on an old server, 2x500Mhz PII's with a
> cable modem (e.g., keeping ~1350 connections open at once). While I have
> quite a bit of RAM and hard drive space Tor doesn't take up much of
> either, and the computing power is more than enough. If you want me to
> run some benchmark's I'd be more than happy to.
(snip)

"Kitsune" started on an old PII 300Mhz with 256MB of RAM; I've since
migrated it to some AMD Duron 800Mhz/512MB RAM hardware a friend gave me.

The Debian Etch install on the hard drive was transferred in its
entirety via a dd command, although I did swap the generic x86 kernel
for a K7-optimized one.

"Kitsune" had been a guard node before, while on the PII; on the Duron,
it's been running for about a month, and has been marked as
Fast/Guard/Stable for most of that time.

It's important to note that - as some have noted here - the stability of
the perimeter router/firewall is VERY important. I used to have a WRT54G
running HyperWRT/Thibor at the "front lines;" it crashed A LOT (it
couldn't handle the large state tables that were being generated).

After migrating "kitsune," I killed the 54G's routing function, and
converted it to a switch/AP only. The old PII that used to run
"kitsune," got a pfSense install.

It's VERY stable, and the traffic shaper is really nice; I haven't had
to use any traffic limitations on "kitsune" itself.

*****

So, bottom line, the processing requirements aren't bad, but you need to
be careful with what you do for a perimeter router/firewall. =:oD

- --
F. Fox
AAS, CompTIA A+/Network+/Security+
Owner of Tor node "kitsune"
http://fenrisfox.livejournal.com
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