Menu
I'm setting up a relay and my understanding is that the ORPort is required to be open to relay traffic from the outside world but do I need to enable the DirPort too?
813
Tor is tunneled inside of TLS, so the probe relies on service detection's automatic tunnel detection. This signature is for the ORPort, the port that accepts client connections and connections from other relays.
Tor relays are also referred to as "routers" or "nodes." They receive traffic on the Tor network and pass it along. Check out the Tor website for a more detailed explanation of how Tor works. There are three kinds of relays that you can run in order to help the Tor network: middle relays, exit relays, and bridges.
Guard and middle relays A middle relay is neither a guard nor an exit, but acts as the second hop between the two. To become a guard, a relay has to be stable and fast (at least 2MByte/s) otherwise it will remain a middle relay. Guard and middle relays usually do not receive abuse complaints.
The only IP address visible to the destination website is that of the final node, known as the exit node. In total, the Tor network is currently made up of about 7,000 relays (nodes) and 800 bridges.
No, you don't need to enable DirPort. If you set the DirPort, your relay will also serve as a directory mirror.
As a directory mirror other relays can query you for information about other relays on the network (for example to get a list of relays for building circuits).
Note that enabling this can significantly increase your bandwidth usage (full directory listings can be fairly large) and you'll have a lot more incoming connections. For example, one of my relays serving as a mirror has over 1200 incoming connections for dir requests and pushes an extra 10-20 Mbps as a result.
I believe the BandwidthRate option includes limiting directory traffic (which is separate from RelayBandwidthRate).
If you want to just run a relay, it's fine to leave DirPort as 0 so you can dedicate as much bandwidth to relaying. There are a lot of relays running as mirrors so I think the capacity for them is pretty good, but running one when possible is encouraged.
69
If you love us? You can donate to us via Paypal or buy me a coffee so we can maintain and grow! Thank you!
Donate Us With
