Greetings list,
a few days ago, Elias Papavasileiou did a "Setup your own Tor relay" workshop in the Greek open source conference FOSSCOMM. I attended the workshop and helped out a bit.
During the workshop, a presentation was given describing how to setup a relay, and then we moved to hands-on, where we helped 3 groups of 2 people each setup a Tor bridge in their laptop. Even tho a laptop is definitely not the right platform for this, the idea was that if those people learned how to setup a Tor relay/bridge they could afterwards set it up themselves on proper hardware.
A few takeaways:
- Setting up a Tor relay is not easy even if it's just "apt-get tor, edit torrc, reload tor". There are various things that can go wrong in the between, and basically all groups asked for assistance even tho they all seemed experienced with Linux system administration.
- Example of fail: One group put a wrong line in their torrc (they tried to launch with a low-port ORPort of 443 even tho they were not root), then had trouble debugging what's going on, then wiped logs and ran Tor manually as root. Tor overwrote the log file, permission issues occured, and Tor could not start again. We had to manually figure this out and remove the bad log file for Tor to work again. That took a while.
- Example of fail: People kind of gave up reading all the comments in the Debian default torrc and asked us for assistance because they did not know what they had to do to make it work. aka what was necessary and what was optional.
- After about 45 mins all three groups managed to successfuly run a bridge.
I'm just mentioning these things here in case someone can relate and improve the situation. There might be a few things we can do (aka improve the default Debian torrc), or even provide images/docker/vagrant for relays. But I'm not good with these things so I can't really suggest things.
Cheers!