[Freedombox-discuss] setting up a tor relay

[David Mintz]

I've been happily running a Tor relay node -- the publicly published, non-exit kind -- on a desktop machine, and decided it would be nice to use FreedomBox on a SBC for that instead, to avoid the need to keep the desktop powered up 24x7 just for the sake of the Tor node. So I got a Raspberry Pi 3 B+ and installed FreedomBox per the instructions -- so far so good. This is behind a Verizon router with port forwarding configured appropriately.

Then I tried installing Tor on the Raspberry through plinth, and updating the port forwarding accordingly (i.e., disabled the rule that forwarded to the desktop box and added one to forward to the FreedomBox; I'm confident I got my IP addresses and port numbers right.) I got errors to the effect that my Tor was not reachable from the outside. I tried all kinds of fiddling with systemd configs, with tor config files, etc., to no avail.

Please forgive me for the sin of not providing actual error output, configurations, a detailed narrative of what I did, etc. I got impatient and re-installed everything, and went back to running Tor on my desktop for now, and all that information is unavailable. I just want to ask as a general question whether I should expect the following alternative strategy to work:

(1) disable Tor on the desktop and remove port forwarding rules.

(2) enable port forwarding to the FreedomBox, consistent with the ORPort and DirPort numbers set in the tor config

(3) install tor from the command line according to https://www.torproject.org/docs/debian.html.en

(4) copy my torrc file over from the desktop and restart the service

Thanks,

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David Mintz
https://davidmintz.org
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