Relay tips and trick / tweaks / infos

Support Relay Operator
1

Hi again,

I hava read Tor Project | Relay Post-install and good practices and other pages but still didn’t found some information. I will ask here mayb someone will help :slight_smile:

  1. How to enable IPv6
  2. Relay restart because i have added a MyFamily new member does affect consensus weight?
  3. Changing the name of relay (but keeping fingerpring) affect with something the weight?
  4. Can someone send me a link to read more about BandwidthRate/ BandwidthBurst/ RelayBandwidthRate how to set them up right? (i didn’t configured anything yet and when i run nyx see limit: 1GB/s burst: 1GB/s and observed 20, i feel something is not right :slight_smile: )
  5. I searched the internet for ways to optimize the relay and discovered How to Run High Capacity Tor Relays i see some settings there anyone has changed anything to increase the speed/stability/etc and can share ?
2

interesting read, newer info would def be welcome.

3
  1. As a rule, you must first define IPv6 from your assigned subnet in the customer interface of your ISP. There you can also adjust the RDNS entries. On the help pages of your ISP you will usually also find instructions on how to adjust the network configuration of your OS. Hetzner, OVH and DO have very detailed help. My example might be helpful for Debian and derivatives.
  2. A restart is not required. A reload is enough for MyFamily and most torrc config changes. IP & Port changes need a restart.
  3. I don’t think so, or never paid any attention to it. Consensus weight goes up and down (because sometimes buggy) and I don’t give a damn.
  4. If you have unlimited bandwidth, you don’t need to set anything. 1GB/s burst is default and max what your relay can do, observed is, what the bwauth has testet. Everything normal and correct.

More info in:
man torrc
BANDWIDTH MANAGEMENT OPTIONS
Bandwidth values in Tor
OnBaSca Documentation
bandwidth file spec

  1. The thread and these settings are over 10 years old and gbit interfaces are normal these days. The defaults of Linux and BSD kernels usually do not need any adjustments. On servers with 1G interfaces and 1-2 tor instances I only have IPv6 autoconfig disabled.
    If you have 10G, 25G or more, then you should look for specific tuning tips for your network card and drivers.
    Some notes on cards with Intel 82599 chips: GitHub - boldsuck/tor-relay-configs: 10 Gigabit Ethernet tweaks
    Attention the forwarding setting in my ‘sysctl.d/local.conf’ are atypical. We route the Tor IP’s via dedicated NIC’s.
    Note: Many tuning tips found on the internet are only suitable for 10G> connections in the LAN (e.g. client to NAS) and are not useful in the wild. The kernel dev’s and -compilers in your distri have useful defaults and kernel autosettings.
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4

Thank you for your answers @boldsuck
Can you please tell me how to reload the torrc config?
I thought to limit the bandwidth on some VPS boxes (if it was the case) to not break the fair use of CPU usage :slight_smile:

5

For most distries that have replaced good old SysVinit with systemd, with: (as root or sudo in front of it)
systemctl reload tor

For status, start, stop use:
systemctl start tor
systemctl stop tor
systemctl restart tor
systemctl status tor

limit the bandwidth:

RelayBandwidthRate 30 MBytes # Throttle traffic to 30MB/s (240.000Kbps)
RelayBandwidthBurst 100 MBytes # But allow bursts up to 100MB/s (800.000Kbps)

limit monthly traffic:

AccountingMax 10 TB
## How we determine when our AccountingMax has been reached. sum|max|in|out (Default: max)
AccountingRule sum
AccountingStart month 1 00:00
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