We often watch historic events unfold without being able to participate in them. The crisis in Iran is different. Due to a media and partial Internet black out, Iranian protesters are having a difficult time getting their message out. You — yes YOU — can actively help them, by providing an anonymous proxy service, so they can securely reach web sites like Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube, which are instrumental to getting the truth out. Instructions on how to set up a Squid proxy are available elsewhere (Windows and Mac), so in this space, I will describe how to set up a Tor proxy. It’s a lot easier than you think.
First, download and install the Vidalia bundle for Windows or Mac from the Tor Project web site. If you’re on Linux like me, you can grab Debian/Ubuntu packages or the source code by following these instructions. More detailed installation instructions are available on the Tor Project site for Windows and Mac, but since I use neither, I’ll defer to them.
Once you have it installed, fire it up. You should see a Control Panel like this:
It will automatically attempt to connect to the Tor network. As you can see, mine is already connected. That’s fine if you want to use Tor for your own anonymity, but we want to set up a relay so that others can connect to the internet through us. We want to be a node on the network. So click “Setup Relaying” and you’ll be presented with a configuration screen similar to this:
First click “Relay traffic for the Tor network.” Then choose a nickname by which your node will be known. As you can see, I chose FreeIran314. You can optionally enter an email address for contact info. Leave the Relay Port as 9001 (note: if you use a firewall, you’ll have to allow incoming connections to port 9001). Then click the next tab, “Bandwidth Limits”:
What you set as your bandwidth limits depends on how fast your Internet connection is. Mine is 10 Mb/s, or 1.25 MB/s, or 1250 KB/s, so I chose an average bandwidth limit that was about 10% of my total connection limit, in this case 100 KB/s, with an maximum rate of twice that. That’s a typical way to configure it. That way, if somebody is sending traffic through my node, they won’t eat up all my bandwidth and slow down my own Internet use. If you don’t know how fast your Internet connection is, you can check here. Note, your connection speed is measured in megaBITS, which you have to divide by 8 to get megaBYTES. Multiply that number by 1000 to get it in KILObytes (as I did above). Then choose a limit that’s 10-20% of that. Finally, click on the tab that says “Exit Policies”:
The Tor network is designed so that everyone is sent through three nodes, and the last one is called the exit node. You can choose to be an exit node or not. If you don’t want to be an exit node (so that your IP address is never revealed to the destination web sites), just unclick all options. Alternatively, you can choose what kinds of services you will be an exit node for (this is a simple matter of allowing traffic through certain ports). As you can see, I allowed encrypted and unencrypted connections to web sites.
That’s it! Click OK and you’re done. You may have to restart the Vidalia bundle. You can check to see if everything is working by looking at the Message Log, which is accessed from the Control Panel:
You should look for a few important messages. I’ve highlighted them above (click the image for a larger version). First you should see “Opening OR listener on 0.0.0.0:9001″. Then you should see “Now checking whether ORPort [YourIPaddress]:9001 is reachable”. Generally that step will fail if you have a firewall and didn’t open the port as per my suggestion above. Finally you should see “Self-testing indicates your ORPort is reachable from the outside. Excellent. Publishing server descriptor.”
If you got that message, congratulations, you are a Tor relay. The Tor network needs many more of them, so your help is greatly appreciated.
P.S. The Tor Project site has official instructions on setting up a Tor relay here, but without the illustrations.
