On Wed, Aug 24, 2016 at 09:47:56AM -0400, Chad MILLER wrote:
I made a tor-middle-relay package, so the TVs, Wifi Routers, Toasters, Self-driving Cars, Phones... of the world that are running that new kind of Ubuntu (or other OS that implements this package system!) can also help the Tor network. [...] Once you have it installed, try $ sudo /snap/bin/tor-middle-relay.configure to bump up your bandwidth limit over the conservative defaults.
Nice idea!
Other people here have very valid points about the security and maintability side of things, but I'll add another point: It looks like the conservative defaults you mention are a BandwidthRate and BandwithBurst of 75 KBytes.
That tiny level of rate limiting basically ensures that none of these relays will ever get the Fast flag, so they will never be used by actual users.
The current recommendation on https://www.torproject.org/docs/tor-relay-debian is to allow at least 250 KBytes/s each way. And even those will be tiny and rarely used compared to the bigger relays.
I wonder if your project would be better at producing bridges? https://www.torproject.org/docs/faq#RelayOrBridge Especially since you could include obfs4 (or even more!) support as part of the bundle.
--Roger