Providing Minds with the Space to Grow
I'm willing to bet the cost of a few servers a month that there are many great minds around the world being silenced due to censorship and lack of digital freedom. With that said, my setup has recently been updated to include a new Tor relay server that replaced one of my web tunnels on the network. It's an interesting hobby that I would liken to watching a plant grow, but in this case, it's the process of a relay server being integrated into the network and keeping it in a healthy state.
It essentially takes around two weeks for a relay to become fully adopted and allocated web traffic accordingly. Without diving into too much technical detail, the three primary types of relays include entry guards, middle relays, and exit relays. I wasn't sure if it was something I wanted to invest in at first, but then I decided that running a non-exit relay server was something I was comfortable doing on my own. By explicitly broadcasting to the network that I was unwilling to host an exit relay, my server would naturally become either an entry guard or middle relay. This process is accomplished through several tests and monitoring over the previously mentioned timeframe of about two weeks.
While this probably sounds about as boring as watching paint dry to most people, I found it interesting to see the metrics slowly start to develop. My server still has time to go and will continue to be used accordingly, but revisiting the metrics page here and there to watch things unfold has been an interesting process nonetheless. Here's a quick screenshot of some of the metrics and flags that have been added over a little more than a week, courtesy of the Tor Project itself. To learn more about the non-profit organization, you can visit them at torproject.org.
