Hello,
i have been running a new relay for a short time period now and would like to bring to your attention the issues faced, that finally led me to refrain from keeping this up any longer:
* Documentation was ok (on torproject.org) and the installation (using deb on ubuntu) was easy. * It took quite some time to understand the implications (opening ports in the router, hazarding security to my computers, as i was - to this date - relying on the routers firewall working) - This job of mine basically got delayed until later, when i would have learned, what is needed in that respect. * Next, i noticed a frequent (daily) behavior of the Tor server dropping traffic to around zero. Inspecting this, let me to understand, my provider was disconnecting me and reassigning a new IP on a daily basis, which took some time to propagate. Even worse: It did not propagate on its own, i needed to restart the tor service to reinitialise... * Asking in the online channel, i was guided to change my "Nickname" torrc config to match the dyndns entry corresponding to my server. * But this never made it to the directories, thus forcing me to manually restart Tor on a daily basis in order to force the changing IP address into them. * Finally, i was told, this behavior would be disruptive to the network, i therefore brought the service down for good, wasting the bandwith, i was willing to spend, for the near future. :-) * Ok, otherwise, i would have to pay additional fees to rent a server off-site with a permanent IP, but that would be giving more, than what was easily affordable, as my machine is running 24/7 and the connections open anyway. Thus Tor doesnt seem to be able to absorb the kind of bandwith, i was willing to share long time.
This is leaving a sad taste on me, who is pretty much interested in privacy, anonymosity, which led me to avoid the mailing lists with a durable email-address. But just using a read-only one wouldnt allow me to post to the list. That is why i created this one temporarily, just to let you know about my experiences...
NewTorKidOnTheBlock (this was the name of my Tor relay)