Stuff to do with spare Linode resources

Tor ?

http://www.torproject.org/

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.

BOINC

just kidding!

@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.

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.

@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.
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.

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

@jebblue:

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.

deleted

@jebblue:

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

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.

Burning extra bandwidth means you won't have it if you get additional traffic or if you want to add additional services to your website. I would say though if you have significant extra bandwidth, you could add some service you weren't sure if you had the resources for before. I'm thinking about adding a Warhammer 40,000 blogging service.

@hybinet:

Tor would be OK if you only use it as a relay and not as an exit node.

But why would you do that, do they pay you or something?

I mean if the risk is having the police home for tea at least a fair return :lol:

Free hosting

If you take every reasonable measure to block illegal traffic, and can prove to the police that you have, I doubt they could arrest you. This would involve strict monitoring of your logs to spot such traffic and blocking ports you notice a lot of illegal traffic on. I don't know of anything else you could do (except maybe run Clamav in the background, and post an email for DMCA complaints).

@Piki:

I doubt they could arrest you.
Bwhahahahahaha, new to the real world eh?

Laws have little to nothing to do with right or wrong, it's how much money you have to hire a good lawyer PROVING that what you're accused of doesn't have a strong enough case law to result in a convection.

Being innocent, lack of hard proof, completely clean track record, has nothing to do with it.

Like with most things, a few rotten people spoil it for the rest, so although Tor is not ALL illegal traffic, enough of it is to make it "not with a ten foot pole" for anyone with common sense.

Back to the OP's question - why does EVERYTHING need to be max'd out. Be happy with what you have, use what you NEED, and don't worry about not max'ing it out.

Run tor then come complaining it's using all your resources. duh… :)

Run Tor as a relay node.

Perfectly safe from a legal a perspective and a security perspective, it will run nicely in a chroot for extra security and good instructions for setting this up are at: https://trac.torproject.org/projects/to … orInChroot">https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/doc/TorInChroot

You can easily control how much bandwidth you want Tor to use (RelayBandwidthRate XXXX KB). A minimum of 20 KB is asked for but as Linode give you a 2TB of data you can spare a little more than that and not max out your cap ;)

Help with the good fight :!:

@redrs:

Perfectly safe from a legal a perspective and a security perspective, it will run nicely in a chroot for extra security and good instructions for setting this up are at: https://trac.torproject.org/projects/to … orInChroot">https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/doc/TorInChroot

I don't think you can say it's "perfectly" safe from a legal perspective, though as I pointed out it's unlike you'll get arrested if you take every reasonable precaution to block illegal traffic.

> I don't think you can say it's "perfectly" safe from a legal perspective, though as I pointed out it's unlike you'll get arrested if you take every reasonable precaution to block illegal traffic.

Tor relays only move encrypted traffic between other Tor nodes, so yes it is perfectly safe to run one. There has never been a case of a relay operator being in trouble.

This is not the case for exit nodes, where anonymous traffic exits the Tor network.

@redrs:

Tor relays only move encrypted traffic between other Tor nodes, so yes it is perfectly safe to run one. There has never been a case of a relay operator being in trouble.

I would agree with Piki that "perfectly" is a strong word to use, as is "never".

One thing you could do would be to start some sort of publicly useable website. For example, you could use the multisite feature of Wordpress to start a blogging service on a specific topic. You could also use this and the Buddypress extension to create a social network hosting site were people could create their own social network for various groups. I'd do it, but such a website wouldn't really fit with what we're working on, plus I'm already planning a wiki host. You could also use ads if it gets popular to offset the added cost of resources.

Make a VPN for your private use, whenever you connect to a public/semi-public wifi!

screen -S while true; do wget http://cachefly.cachefly.net/100mb.test -O /dev/null; done

Isn't the KKK now on Tor? I heard that they got kicked off both GoDaddy and Google Domains recently.