[tor-relays] Relay migration: best practices?

Mailing Lists tor-relays
1

Hello,

I operate a small family of relays, over the 5 years it's been very set and forget and easy to maintain.
Over those 5 years the servers have been cluttered with other half completed projects and general mess.

I plan on reinstalling the OS from scratch, and understand I must backup the "keys/ed25519_master_id_secret_key" and "keys/secret_id_key" in the DataDirectory. Then copy them over on the new server.

The hostname will change but the IP will stay the same. The server I am working on is not listed as a fallback directory server, but has been in the past.

Is there any other things I can do to disrupt the damage done to the tor network during this downtime? Especially to any clients using it as a bridge.

Thanks,

1 Like
2

If the IP and uplink speed does not change you can simply
- stop tor at the old server
- migrate the IP
- migrate the tor config and the entire datadir
- ensure the datadir is removed on the old server to avoid accidentally running more than one tor instance with the same key
- ensure datadir permissions are set properly
- start tor on the new server

Compared to only copying the key files, this will avoid tor assuming it is a new relay without prior history.

kind regards,
nusenu

···

--
https://nusenu.github.io
_______________________________________________
tor-relays mailing list
tor-relays@lists.torproject.org
https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-relays

1 Like