Hi all,
I have been following the emails with intrigue. I run a Windows10 system at home through Virgin Media Hub, my package with them is the 300Mbps one. I recently had cause to research what Tor was about. I decided upon that research to run a Middle Relay.
So I purchased my computer parts (I self Build my machines) and obtained the help of a friend to load Ubuntu 16.04 LTS. It's not a super machine but it runs on a AMD A4-6300 APU with Radeon(tm) HD Graphics × 2 - OS 64bit - with an SSD hard drive.
I followed the instructions on how to load the relay and set it up, took me more than a week or so as I am no genius on Linux.
slow learning curve but we got there.
My relay is called Ybslik - it's been up and down due to my inability to understand how to configure things within the terminal.
But with the help from StackExchange I have been able to complete some tasks.
My small relay is now working ok and I hope adding to the Diversity of Tor.
Ybslik
Steve Bishop
On 19/08/17 17:01, Scott Bennett wrote:
Zack Weinberg zackw@cmu.edu wrote:
Relay diversity and client diversity are two different things. Last I heard
People who run relays usually started out as people running clients.They liked tor and decided to help out by running a relay, *too*. Do you really believe they would choose to install some OS other than what they already use just to help diversify the relay population? I haven't used the tor browser bundle for Windows in a long time. Does its controller's GUI still offer the option of running a relay in addition to being a client while tor is up and running? Some of us only run one computer. Are you suggesting that we spin up a VM to install an unfamiliar OS on which to run a relay, just to help with relay diversity? What current client-user will leap at the idea of learning to do all that and do it safely in order to run a relay, which he also will need to learn to do safely, when he could instead just run a relay on a system he already knows, thereby reducing his learning load to only the stuff he needs to know about tor? The volume of material needed to learn an OS vastly exceeds what a new relay operator needs to know about tor, after all.
it was a bad idea to run a relay on the same computer as a client, so I
It's arguably a bad idea to do that if your relay is an Exit, but thenit's usually an even worse idea to run an Exit at home. Some people think it's a bad idea to run tor outside of a jail, too. (Unfortunately, most OS do not have jails.)
don't think Tor Browser for server OSes like Solaris is a great use of developer effort.
I suggest you ponder more on the matter of where relay operators comefrom and what they might be willing to do or have the resources to devote to running OS foreign to their normal uses for their computers. Either you want to recruit for diversity or you just want to serve the OS that are already most abundantly running relays. If you want to recruit for diversity, then you need to consider how you're going to do that successfully. I contend that that generally means recruiting people who are already running those OS. That, in turn, means getting them to learn about tor by giving them something they can use to try it out. Telling them, "We'd like you to run a tor relay on your Bitrig system, though you won't be able to get much use out of it yourself, not even to try it out", doesn't seem to me to be very likely to cut it. That idea also seems to be corroborated by the current relay diversity, which is the situation that has brought us to the current discussion. Running a relay safely and smartly has a significant learning curve to climb at the outset. Making it appealing enough to them to climb it is called recruiting.
Windows is certainly the highest-value target for client diversity efforts.
How so? (Unless by target you mean client users to be eliminated? Thatwould certainly be *an* approach to increasing client OS diversity, but not an acceptable one, IMHO.) It already has the most clients. Anyway, we're not discussing increasing client OS diversity in this thread, but rather increasing the OS diversity of relays. Please stop to consider what diversification and diversity actually mean, which is the opposite of what you argue for here. They don't mean piling most of the resources into growing the dominant subpopulation. The same applies to LINUX.
I hear the Brave company is hiring someone to work specifically on Tor integration, maybe you want to apply: https://brave.com/jobs/?gh_jid=781438
Windows is already running a huge percentage of the tor relay population.How are you going to recruit Windows users to run relays on an OS they don't already use? I contend that you won't. Instead, you must recruit current users of such OS.
In my opinion, the best way to improve relay diversity would be to work on system administration automation. For instance, as far as I know there is no equivalent of Debian's 'unattended-upgrades' tool for any of the BSDs, or even for most Linux distributions.
Are you kidding? Debian's "unattended-upgrades" tool must be somethingspectacular then. Please tell us what it does that isn't handled by, say, freebsd-update for the base OS and "pkg upgrade --yes" for the installed packages like tor? IIRC, DragonflyBSD uses pkg, too. Or how about pkgsrc on NetBSD? I've forgotten what OpenBSD uses, but it may well be pkgsrc. As for how the other BSDs perform binary updates of their base OS, I couldn't tell you, but I'd be astonished if they didn't have something for that. Just use crontab entries to run these tools unattended and periodically. On FreeBSD, if you build your ports from source via the ports tree, you could run "svn update /usr/ports" and either use portmaster or poudriere to build them and install the newly built versions. A lot of people do something similar for updating the base system from source in the other BSDs. The FreeBSD developers are in the process of setting up large blocks of the base OS as packages that can be automatically updated just like any packages built from ports, although I don't think that's quite ready for prime time yet. NetBSD may already have this capability; I just don't recall. Relay operators do not come into existence like virtual particle pairs from a vacuum. We're talking about humans, and those come from real-life, individual contexts. If you want to recruit them, then understanding and accepting that fact are critical to doing it successfully.
Scott Bennett, Comm. ASMELG, CFIAG
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