Linode Forum

[rohanrns]

I'm not very bandwidth intensive and trying to find neat things to do with spare Linode capacity.

Anyone have any neat ideas? Looking for things that are mostly for the "greater good" like joining the NTP pool or hosting a linux distro mirror.

[oliver]

Tor ?

http://www.torproject.org/

[hybinet]

Tor would be OK if you only use it as a relay and not as an exit node. It shouldn't use too much resources, either. But if you're brave enough to set up an exit node, you'd better inform the Linode staff in advance and brace yourself for DMCA notices and unexpected accusations of child pr0n, etc. Technically, you're unlikely to get into legal trouble in the U.S. for running a Tor exit node, but I gather it can sometimes get annoying.

On the other hand, you get hundreds of GB of bandwidth included in your plan precisely because lots of people (like you) don't actually use much. If a few people served the "greater good" using leftover capacity, that would be fine, but if this were to become widespread, it might not actually serve the "greater good". So don't try to burn all your bandwidth every month. Just do what you think is good, and it will be good.

[Alucard]

BOINC

just kidding!

[Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason]

rohanrns wrote: I'm not very bandwidth intensive and trying to find neat things to do with spare Linode capacity.

Anyone have any neat ideas? Looking for things that are mostly for the "greater good" like joining the NTP pool or hosting a linux distro mirror.

I run a Tor relay here's some statistics for it and this is the config file.

You can also run Freenet, but it takes up a lot more resources.

[TeddyR42]

rohanrns wrote: I'm not very bandwidth intensive and trying to find neat things to do with spare Linode capacity.

Anyone have any neat ideas? Looking for things that are mostly for the "greater good" like joining the NTP pool or hosting a linux distro mirror.
If you want to check out ipv6 and what having a real daul stack would look like and are not able to get it from your own ISP, then configure squid proxy (with authentication or limits to your own static home ipv4 address of course) and use it when you want to see what the world would look like from a daul stack ipv4/ipv6 capable IP...

The destination website will see the traffic as coming from your linode addresses as a dual stack with IPV6 as the preferred source address. The connection from your home computer to the linode is via ipv4.

[jebblue]

Isn't running a Tor relay supporting those who break the law?

[squircle]

jebblue wrote: Isn't running a Tor relay supporting those who break the law?

Are you implying that the only reason why one would use Tor is to break the law? 'Cause that's not true.

[zunzun]

squircle wrote: Are you implying that the only reason why one would use Tor is to break the law? 'Cause that's not true.

Absolutely - you can use Tor to see how far you can bend the law before it breaks.

James

[hybinet]

jebblue wrote: Isn't running a Tor relay supporting those who break the law?
zunzun wrote: Absolutely - you can use Tor to see how far you can bend the law before it breaks.
Depends on whose "law" you're talking about. Some of us would gladly support people who break Chinese or Iranian censorship laws.

Of course, a complicating factor is that people who break laws that you do care about (such as laws against child pornography) may also be able to use your Tor relay. Whether you want to tolerate such abuse is up to you. Also, there's a difference between a relay (generally okay) and an exit node (more risky, thus generally frowned upon in a shared environment). There was a very lengthy thread in this forum some time ago on this very topic.

By the way, this thread is more than 1.5 yrs old.