I used to run a pair of TOR relays, in response to the first EFF TOR Challenge around June 2011. At the time they ran on my Ubuntu servers (10.04). Then, about a year and half ago, I went to a pair of FreeBSD servers (I will have to see about doing the upgrade to 9.3 soon). And, I continued to run those relays, until September.
When I first set these up, they were limited exit relays. (the Challenge initially was for relays or bridges, where only relays would get counted and they didn't detail how to set up non-exit relays.) But, I soon found myself blocked for Freenode, which doesn't allow exit node IPs to connect to them if any exits would allow connecting to their systems (which includes HTTP), but they do run a hidden service for TOR access and encourage people to run relays to provide bandwidth for users to reach their hidden service.
After some Google searches, I found out the, now obvious, step to make non-exit relays. Earlier this year I found myself blocked by a site, they said they block any TOR relay, since non-exit relays make it possible for exit relays to abuse their site. So, I blacklisted them.
But, more and more sites started blocking IPs of non-exit relays, so I finally decided to stop running TOR relays on my servers (in September, they came back briefly after a reboot, but now they won't). I still have a separate TOR running, so I'll have the option to use it (or to check out the Facebook hidden service
).
Along the way I did launch a bridge instance in AWS. Initially on the free tier, but I continued to run it (costs around $21/month). On Saturday, I replaced it with a more recent AMI configured as an
obfsproxy bridge spot request instance. The old AMI was Ubuntu 10.04 based, and the new AMI is Ubuntu 12.04. I had thought of trying to use FreeBSD, but thought the Tor-Cloud images would be faster to get up and running. They weren't, as TOR and other packages weren't installed (which also meant there were a lot of configurations I didn't save from the old instance), so I spent a lot more time this weekend on it than I had planned.
I will see how that works. Perhaps I'll consider resurrecting my relays this way. Perhaps I'll use FreeBSD in AWS for something else (though there might be a better non-EC2 way to deploy it).
The Dreamer.