Tor-Ramdisk

[dante <dante@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi everyone,

A month ago I developed a small, ramdisk only (ie diskless), linux
system whose only purpose was to run a tor server.  The aim of the
project was to meet the following goals:

    1) small footprint - i686 (single or SMP) with 256MB+ RAM
    2) to run only in ram so nothing survives a reboot
    3) to do no logging whatsoever at any level
    4) to be secure - GRSEC hardened kernel
    5) to run a tor server, allowing for any configuration,
middle/exit/directory, etc

I suspect such a project might be of interest to other Tor operators.


I ran a middle-man node for about 20 days with success
(node-name=RamOnly), but because I compiled statically against GLIBC, I
broke DNS resolution, and so it would not work as an exit node.  I've
rebuild the image from scratch compiling against UCLIBC and I'm now in
the testing phase again.  I'm running another middle-man/directory
server (node-name=RamOnlyUCLIBC).  Here's the url for the howto and the
image:

    ftp://ddl.dyc.edu/pub/tor-uclibc-ramdisk

The kernel is compiled with support for most 100MB and 1GB NIC cards. 
Any comments or testers would be much appreciated.

More details:

    busybox-1.8.2 - minimally configured, compiled with UCLIBC
    linux-2.6.23.12 patched with Gentoo's hardening patches (GRSEC)
    tor-1.2.19

---

Anthony G. Basile, Ph.D.
Director of Information Technology,
D'Youville College,
320 Porter Ave.
Buffalo NY, 14201