[Tor-BSD] EOL of old nodes with old tor

George Rosamond george at ceetonetechnology.com
Thu Oct 10 00:39:18 EDT 2019


For those who haven't heard, nodes with EOL'd version of tor are being
excluded:

https://blog.torproject.org/removing-end-life-relays-network

I think it's high-time for this to happen.  It should be standard protocol.

There was some panic about losing so many relays, but:

* the Tor network has the capacity to lose that bandwidth, at least
temporarily, last I saw.

* vulnerable old versions are a danger to the entire network including
the users.

* quite honestly, if a Tor relay is your first time running a public
internet box, please be careful.

What's interesting is that there's been a jump in the percent of *BSD
relays recently, some of which precedes the EOL node exclusion:

bridges-os-count     FreeBSD 35 (2.9%)
bridges-os-count     OpenBSD 16 (1.3%)
bridges-os-count     NetBSD 1 (0.1%)


relays-os-count      FreeBSD 346 (6.2%)
relays-os-count      OpenBSD 75 (1.3%)
relays-os-count      NetBSD 6 (0.1%)
relays-os-count      ElectroBSD 4 (0.1%)
relays-os-count      GNU/kFreeBSD 1 (0.0%)

If 7.7% of public relays are *BSD, that's the highest percent I can
remember.

On that note, keeping a sane maintenance schedule for your node(s) is
smart. These are public-facing internet services, and the stakes can be
high for the "consumers" out there.

That should go without saying....

g



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