Last week I mentioned that I purchased a Raspberry Pi specifically to use as a Tor relay. Two days ago I received the following e-mail:
Hello and welcome to Tor!
We’ve noticed that your Tor node christopherburg (id: 3F17 3F07 DDBB D8F6 34C7 9588 6F99 E808 1AE6 AB42) has been running long enough to be flagged as “stable”. First, we would like to thank you for your contribution to the Tor network! As Tor grows, we require ever more nodes to improve browsing speed and reliability for our users. Your node is helping to serve the millions of Tor clients out there.
As a node operator, you may be interested in the Tor Weather service, which sends important email notifications when a node is down or your version is out of date. We here at Tor consider this service to be vitally important and greatly useful to all node operators. If you’re interested in Tor Weather, please visit the following link to register:
https://weather.torproject.org/
You might also be interested in the tor-announce mailing list, which is a low volume list for announcements of new releases and critical security updates. To join, visit the following address:
https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-announce
Thank you again for your contribution to the Tor network! We won’t send you any further emails unless you subscribe.
Disclaimer: If you have no idea why you’re receiving this email, we sincerely apologize! You shouldn’t hear from us again.
As of this writing my relay has been running for 8 days, has sent 38.65 GB of data, and has received 38.10 GB of data. I’m happy that this thing has proven to be an effective relay. My next step is to pursue the development of a relay image that can be written to an SD card, plugged into a Raspberry Pi, and operate as a relay without requiring any additional (or, at least, significant) configuration.