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Comment by cottonseed | Hacker News Reader

I had been meaning to run a Tor relay for a while. The EFF Tor Challenge [0] motivated me to get it done. It was incredibly easy. If you have a VPS with unused bandwidth, please consider taking a few minutes to set up a Tor relay.

[0] https://www.eff.org/torchallenge/

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Keep in mind though when setting this up to take a close look at your exit policy settings, to ensure you only route the traffic you want and where you want it.

I span up a relay at home to play around with, but just skimmed over the exit policy settings and ended up running an exit node. Not big deal really, as it was only advertised for about 14 hours before I noticed and disabled it. It was only after a few weeks when my girlfriend was complaining she kept getting messages from websites refusing to show her content on the basis that she was connecting over the Tor network (which she wasn't) that I realised my home IP was blacklisted, and it took a while for me to get a new lease and IP.

I'm not telling people to not run exit nodes, but people shouldn't just go and spin up a Tor relay with default settings, because it will by default run as an exit node, and depending on the hosting provider, this may or may not be an issue.

As I recall, best practice for running an exit node at home (if you want to do it) is to have a separate Internet connection for it. That way you keep your traffic separate from the exit node traffic.

My distro's tor setup (arch in this case) should default to not being an exit node, relevant default lines in the torrc:

  ExitPolicy accept *:6660-6667,reject *:* # allow irc ports but no more
  ExitPolicy accept *:119 # accept nntp as well as default exit policy
  ExitPolicy reject *:* # no exits allowed

Installing via `pacman -S tor` and enabling via `systemctl enable tor.service` doesn't start an exit node / relay but a simple client.

Are you using linux, windows or osx?

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