tor-relay-bootstrap-rpi

This is a script to bootstrap a Raspberry PI to be a set-and-forget Tor relay. It assumes it will be running at home behind a residential router that supports UPNP (most of them do).

The script should be used with Raspbian Stretch Lite (tested with 2018-04-18 release).

tor-relay-bootstrap does this:

Upgrades all the software on the system
Installs and configures Tor to be a relay (but still requires you to manually edit torrc to set Nickname, ContactInfo, etc. for this relay)
Configures automatic updates
Tells your residential router to forward the necessary ports to reach the Tor relay
Gives instructions on what the sysadmin needs to manually do at the end

To use it, boot up your raspberry PI, login as pi user, then:

sudo apt-get install -y git
git clone https://github.com/mricon/tor-relay-bootstrap-rpi.git
cd tor-relay-bootstrap-rpi
sudo ./bootstrap.sh

Once it is done, you can disconnect it from keyboard/monitor, plug it into a free Ethernet port on your router, attach the rpi power cable to some USB port (there's probably one on the router you can use), and pretty much forget about it.

Adjusting the bandwidth limits

You want to set Tor bandwidth limit to be about half of your residential upload max. Here's how to calculate it:

First, find out your upload max: https://www.google.com/search?q=speed+test

Click "Run Speed Test" and wait for your upload numbers. Take the "Mbps upload" number and multiply it by 128 (we divide by 8 and multiply by 1024). E.g. if you got 21.5 Mbps, your maximum upload is 21.5*128 = 2752 KBytes.

You should set your bandwidth limit to about half of that, and burst to close to the max (unless you're feeling generous):

RelayBandwidthRate 1300 KBytes
RelayBandwidthBurst 2600 KBytes

Remember to systemctl restart tor@default after making any changes to torrc.

Making sure it's working by watching pretty graphs

If you want to make sure everything is working, as user pi run:

sudo -u debian-tor nyx

On older versions the command is:

sudo -u debian-tor arm

It will take a bit to start, but eventually will show pretty usage graphs (or errors that will help you troubleshoot if something is not working).