Hey there, I want to run a Tor Node. What would you advice me? Is this illegal ? Will my ISP cut me off? Where can I get started?
Wuemeli
What’s the point or benefit of running a tor node?
As I see it, it’s just random traffic that might be illegal going through your connection.
It’s safe unless you run an exit node. All my VPS’s run tor relays (mostly bridges) except for the IPV6-only servers where the support still isn’t there. In my opinion all VPS’s should be running Tor relays unless you have a specific reason not to (like if you have less than 1GB RAM you probably shouldn’t). All the documentation is on the Tor website. Read up & decide if you want to run a normal relay or a bridge and follow the instructions accordingly.
As an alternative to (or in addition to) a relay/bridge, you can also run one or more instances of Snowflake Proxy which is a special type of Tor on-ramp that doesn’t require running a full Tor instance, making it more suitable for low-RAM systems.
I encountered ddos attacks on my entry/relay node. So I stopped it again.
Right after the node was fully provisioned and registered in the tor database it started. Had internet crashes multiple times a day.
Give it a try, better not an exit node, just relay or entry and have a look on it. It’s always good to help the tor network in any way. But be aware of what I encountered.
If you run an exit node, while it is legal, you will likely have to do deal with the police knocking at the door from time to time.
I ran a middle node for a few months a looooong time ago. Was hit over and over about running an open proxy by the abuse reporting system on the VPS host haphost ;which confused me as it was it has not an endpoint on either end just a middle hop for other nodes. Plus… Everytime I have setup a node since following official configs it’s been broken into and had every file apart from those essential to run the tor binary deleted lol. Three times and the exact same thing happened, Crazy stuff. The only port I had open was ssh and that had a crazy long password so there must have been some other way they got in 😂 but as I said it was a long time ago and I was not as experienced as I am now, but it did put me off contributing to the network.