Onion Pi

[Keegan Quinn]

Pretty neat!

http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/06/onion-pi-turns-raspberry-pi-into-tor-proxy-and-wireless-access-point/

I don't know about routing all traffic through Tor, like these folks
seem to be doing, but I think some of the newer and more powerful PTP
nodes would make great Tor relays.

--
Keegan Quinn
http://keegan.ws/
+1-619-663-5432
keega...@gmail.com

[Gordon Morehouse]

On Wed, 19 Jun 2013 12:28:10 -0700, Keegan Quinn <keega...@gmail.com> wrote:

> Pretty neat!
>
> http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/06/onion-pi-turns-raspberry-pi-into-tor-proxy-and-wireless-access-point/
>
> I don't know about routing all traffic through Tor, like these folks
> seem to be doing, but I think some of the newer and more powerful PTP
> nodes would make great Tor relays.

I've been experimenting with running a Tor relay on a Raspberry Pi. It's not yet fully bulletproof due to "circuit creation storms" which can overwhelm the Pi and cause it, or a consumer router (eg WRT54G with Tomato) to crash. There's some discussion on tor-dev about this.

However, I've done a lot of tuning, gotten the Pi fairly stable with an assemblage of sysctl tweaks, and when a "storm" isn't happening I can confirm that a Pi can push about 1Mbps of relay traffic without too many "oops wow this computer is slow" type messages in the logs. Beyond ~1.5Mbps it gets a little dicey, at least with the version of Raspbian I'm using. I imagine software improvements will push this higher down the line, and I'm hoping to come up with a way to clamp down on the "circuit creation storms" such that the Pis themselves and any hapless routers won't crash.

Beyond that, I've been running Tor relays for a long time, and if your host is generous with bandwidth, 5Mbps is easy on a moderately low-end VPS so long as there is enough RAM to accommodate the number of circuits that'll eventually be handled by your relay.

I'm very interested in the juxtaposition of censorship-resistant communications technology and projects like personaltelco - I still want to run a node out of my house but it'll be toward the end of the summer before I have the free time to look into it.

-Gordon M.

[Gary]

On Jun 19, 2013, at 3:18 PM, "Gordon Morehouse" <gor...@morehouse.me> wrote:

> I still want to run a node out of my house

Did anyone else see the Comcast announcement that their latest home CPE that include wireless radios will soon be used to deploy a public guest SSID that any Comcast customer will be able to use? Does this imply that they'll be changing their EULA to be more sharing friendly? Or was it changed a long time ago I'm just catching up with the times?

-Gary

[Russell Senior]

>>>>> "Gary" == Gary <ga...@eyetraxx.net> writes:

Gary> On Jun 19, 2013, at 3:18 PM, "Gordon Morehouse"

Gary> <gor...@morehouse.me> wrote:
>> I still want to run a node out of my house

Gary> Did anyone else see the Comcast announcement that their latest
Gary> home CPE that include wireless radios will soon be used to
Gary> deploy a public guest SSID that any Comcast customer will be
Gary> able to use? Does this imply that they'll be changing their EULA
Gary> to be more sharing friendly? Or was it changed a long time ago
Gary> I'm just catching up with the times?

AFAIK, the EULA has not changed. This is just SOP vendor lock-in. If
you are Comcast subscriber, I guess it might be useful, but if you are
not, then you are just as screwed as you were before.


--
Russell Senior, President
rus...@personaltelco.net

[Gordon Morehouse]

I personally pay for Comcast Business since I have no other viable options. (Comcast residential is not a viable option. Neither is CenturyLink. Sadly, neither are the indie WISPs who need to be doing about 500x more to expand their footprint.) Not sure what the Comcast Business EULA states, but honestly, they can get stuffed. I routinely push near my maximum bandwidth 24/7 and all I get is a letter once a month offering to "review my account" to "optimize my experience."

I don't know how traffic from a PTP node is handled - have you had incidents where Comcast figured it out and waved the EULA over somebody's head who was on residential?

-Gordon