Multiple snowflake proxies behind same IP?

Hi everyone,

Is it okay to run multiple snowflake proxies behind the same IP, provided I have bandwidth for more?

IIRC, there were reasons to not host multiple relays behind the same IP, but I wasn’t sure if this applied to snowflakes as well.

I have a snowflake docker container running on a home server, and was considering running a couple more on other home devices since I have plenty of bandwidth to spare. I wanted to make sure this wouldn’t cause issues, or if there’s additional special config I’d need to add to docker-compose.yml to support this.

Thanks in advance!

I asked on irc and got said that it is OK to run more than one snowflake proxy in the same IP.

1 Like

Right, I think it is “mostly” fine.

You shouldn’t run too many relays behind the same IP address, because we want to ensure that it’s hard for a single person to run too much of the Tor network too easily.

And you shouldn’t run multiple different kinds of bridges (e.g. both an obfs4 bridge and a Snowflake) behind the same IP address, because then if a censor identifies and blocks one of them by IP address, they end up blocking the others for free, maybe without even knowing it.

But running several Snowflakes behind one IP address should be ok. It is essentially just turning you into a more eager Snowflake volunteer – Snowflake works by periodically reaching out to the broker to ask if any censored users need a connect-back right now, and the more Snowflakes you run, the more often you will end up reaching out to the broker to ask, and so the more often you will be matched with a censored user.

The “standalone” Snowflakes (the headless ones that you install with go) already reach out much more often than the extension-based Snowflakes, so in a sense they are already running “many” Snowflakes.

Hope this helps!

5 Likes

That’s great, thanks for looking into this @arma and @emmapeel !

Good to know, sounds like I should be okay running two or three snowflakes from my home IP! I’ll be sure not to run any other relay types behind my IP though.

Thanks for the info!

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