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Hosting your own services. Preferably at home and on low-power or shared hardware.

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am i an idiot: selfhosting a Signal Proxy and/or a Tor Relay (slrpnk.net)

submitted 3 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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does anyone here have experience hosting a Signal proxy and/or a Tor relay? there's a blog post on signal.org asking for folks to help, and i can but i don't know enough about network security to feel safe/confident doing some of this stuff. same with Tor - i've always wanted to host an exit relay (and in fact have this whole long theory about how every public library in the US should host an exit relay, but that's for another post someday maybe).

do any of you have experience with doing this? what kind of best practices would you recommend? any good resources on protecting your network that you might point me to? i will be getting my Net+ cert within the next year but for now i am starting from "enthusiastic beginner" and want to be helpful, but careful.

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

Hosting a signal proxy is probably not a big deal if you don't plan to ever travel to countries that have blocked Signal, but I would strongly advise against hosting a Tor exit node as a private individual. Tor is used for criminal activities all the time, and unless you have plausible deniability as an organization (and a good lawyer), it will be blamed on you personally.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 months ago

maybe i can incorporate a 501c(3) and run it as an NGO, ha! but, seriously, fair point. i have heard both horror stories (SWAT teams bursting in in the middle of the night, etc) and bore-er stories (ran an exit node for 3 years, nothing ever happened). i guess i'm worried, and that worry maybe implies that i should not do it just yet. Signal proxy might be the way to go.