running a Tor guard relay on OpenBSD and Vultr
Why?
- easy way to give back to community
- bandwidth
- non-Linux relay improves diversity https://blog.torproject.org/new-guide-running-tor-relay/
- good learning experience
- support alternative cloud providers
Requirements
Tor uses a lot of bandwidth therefore you want to optimise for that.
A guard relay needs at least a constat 2MB/s download & upload. Note that Vultr (like most cloud providers) only charge for egress. So 2*60*60*24*31/1024/1024 ~= 5.1TB. Vultr provides 2TB free of bandwith.
- Get two AMD High Performance - $12/month for 4TB
- You can use one of them as a personal VM / hosting - link to my stack (Syncthing)
- Install OpenBSD
- choose a random string of letters for a username and a random port between 10000 and 600000 TODO: random.org
- Configure Tor to use between 4.2MB/s and 4.6MB/s
- Set max monthly bandwidth to 6000MB/s - if configured correctly you should never exceed that.
- https://community.torproject.org/relay/setup/guard/openbsd/
Wembaster stuff
- reload daemon on failure
- blacklist on iptables
- contribute logs to abuseip
- keep a tmux session open
- host a hidden service!
- consider how to receive notifications when the server is down
- backup they private key