2015-10-14 23:00 GMT+02:00 Tim Wilson-Brown - teor teor2345@gmail.com:

On 15 Oct 2015, at 07:55, Cristian Consonni kikkocristian@gmail.com wrote: I am currently running three small relays on two different services/ISPs.

I have two somewhat unrelated questions:

• given costant resource (i.e. euro/month) I can afford to run relays

is it in general better to run one bigger relay or, say, two smaller ones.

One bigger relay - more bandwidth, less latency, and less work for you, unless… you are providing diversity of locations (geographic or AS), operating systems, or configurations with your multiple relays.

I am providing geographic diversity, yes.

• are there any tools to manage multiple tor node? For example, if I

want to check if there are security updates I have to login separately in each system and launch them manually. Is this the way I should do this or there are ways to monitor the status of all my nodes and maintaing them as a whole.

Debian has an unattended-upgrades package that will even restart the machine when needed, if configured to do so. (I think there’s another package for the restarts.) It will also send emails every time it upgrades a package.

You might want to consider also doing Tor version upgrades this way, but I’ve found that it's best to do them manually but regularly, then check they worked. Others might have better experiences with automated Tor upgrades.

thanks for the advice.

Cristian

Green Dream disturbed my sleep to write:

You could use something like Puppet or Chef to manage multiple nodes. However, the compute resources and time involved with setting up either solution are high enough that it probably wouldn't make sense to do this for only 3 nodes.

An alternative to Puppet or Chef (and I'm a fan of both) would be Ansible; it's much simpler to pick up, and uses SSH to connect to machines to manage them -- no master server needed. I'd say that with three nodes, something like this is pretty close to being worth your time. Have a look through the walkthrough:

http://docs.ansible.com/ansible/intro_getting_started.html

Thanks, Hugh

On 10/15/2015 01:22 AM, Green Dream wrote:

...

An alternative to Puppet or Chef (and I'm a fan of both) would be Ansible; it's much simpler to pick up, and uses SSH to connect to machines to manage them -- no master server needed.

You just changed my life. I just hadn't looked into Ansible yet. It took about 5 minutes to setup, and seems ideal for managing a handful of nodes. Thank you!

See https://github.com/nusenu/ansible-relayor !