Tor: Please block these file-sharing ports from your exit policy
Hi folks, You're getting this mail because you've registered a Tor server. Thanks for contributing to the Tor network! We've been getting a lot of nodes lately from people saying they're happy Tor exists because now they can publish anonymously, reach websites that are blocked from their country, etc etc. This is all possible because of people like you. There are two parts to this mail: (1) asking how Tor servers are doing and reminding you to upgrade / restart them, and (2) asking you to prepend some more exit policy lines in their torrc. ****** Part one: ****** If your Tor server has crashed and you haven't noticed, please notice, and consider upgrading to at least 0.0.9.3 and restarting it. :) If it was running 0.0.9.3 when it crashed, please let me know of any hints (e.g. core files and error messages) you might have for us. If you've turned off your Tor server because it's eating too much of your bandwidth/CPU, please consider setting BandwidthRate and BandwidthBurst and starting it up again. Bandwidth limiting also limits the cpu use, since it's tied to how many bytes you process. Even cable and DSL rates are usable and useful to us. Also, note that we've implemented Hibernation, which lets you set a maximum number of bytes to handle per day/week/month, and your server goes to sleep in between. Let me know if you need help choosing good configuration parameters; I'm happy to help. If you're feeling adventurous, feel free to try the code in CVS: http://tor.eff.org/developers.html It hasn't crashed on us lately, and it uses pthreads rather than forking so the "using lots of memory for each dnsworker" problem should be resolved. We'll be putting out an actual package for 0.1.0-alpha in a week or two, if you prefer to wait. If you're feeling adventurous and still have bandwidth to spare, feel free to set your BandwidthRate to something higher than the 780 KB default. http://serifos.eecs.harvard.edu:8000/cgi-bin/exit.pl?sortbw=1 shows the daily top servers by usefulness, for those with a competitive streak. :) And if you have any wishlist items or other comments, we'd love to hear them. ****** Part two: ****** In the past weeks, file-sharing has been pummeling the Tor network: http://www.noreply.org/tor-running-routers/ While we don't have any legal or moral opinions about this particular traffic, we need to take technical measures to make the network usable again. One solution would be to enumerate the ten or so ports that we know we want to accept, and reject the rest. We may end up needing to do that, but we'd like to try an intermediate approach first. So, please prepend the following line to your exit policy, by putting this line in your torrc file: ExitPolicy reject *:4661-4666,reject *:6346-6429,reject *:6881-6999 There's no need to do this if you're a middleman node, or your chosen exit policy already rejects these. But otherwise, please do it even if you personally do not mind carrying traffic for these ports: Tor's architecture means that most of the hops in the circuit don't know what traffic they're carrying, and at least for now we'd like to crank down the overall bandwidth used by applications on these ports. Hopefully in the future we'll have a better (e.g. more decentralized) Tor that can handle it, but there's no point letting the network die in the meantime. Thanks! --Roger ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07078, 11.61144 http://www.leitl.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE http://moleculardevices.org http://nanomachines.net [demime 1.01d removed an attachment of type application/pgp-signature]
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Roger Dingledine