Have you ever used tor? It's a browser(and more) that can let you browse privately. For those of us who care about our privacy and want to give back, running a tor relay is a great way to do so.
The following instructions are for a Debian based server. I use Debian Trixie and this guide will be for that.
Get set up, then run the following:
apt update
apt upgrade -y
apt install apt-transport-https -y
echo "deb [signed-by=/usr/share/keyrings/tor-archive-keyring.gpg] https://deb.torproject.org/torproject.org $(lsb_release -cs) main" | tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/tor.list
wget -qO- https://deb.torproject.org/torproject.org/A3C4F0F979CAA22CDBA8F512EE8CBC9E886DDD89.asc | gpg --dearmor | tee /usr/share/keyrings/tor-archive-keyring.gpg >/dev/null
apt update
apt install tor deb.torproject.org-keyring -y
At this point, you'll have tor installed on your machine. The next step is to configure it. The configuration file lives in the following location: /etc/tor/torrc. Open it using your favorite text editor.
vim /etc/tor/torrc
While you can configure a lot more, the minimum you want is the following:
Nickname <REPLACEME1>
ContactInfo <REPLACEME2>
ORPort 443
ORPort [<REPLACEME3>]:443
ExitRelay 0
ExitPolicy reject *:*
RelayBandwidthRate <REPLACEME4> MB
RelayBandwidthBurst <REPLACEME5> MB
AccountingMax <REPLACEME6> TB
AccountingStart month 1 00:00
REPLACEME1 is the name of the node. Give it something unique to identify it.
REPLACEME2 is optional, and is a way to contact you about the node.
REPLACEME3 is the server's IPv6 address.
REPLACEME4 is how much network you want the server to use generally.
REPLACEME5 is the absolute max network that you want the server to use.
REPLACEME6 is how many TB you want to handle form the server.
The ExitRelay and ExitPolicy lines are so your node doesn't get used as an exit, just a relay.
A stripped example would be as follows:
Nickname Hive
ContactInfo noreply@hive.io
ORPort 443
ORPort [2607:f8b0:4005:812::200e]:443
ExitRelay 0
ExitPolicy reject *:*
RelayBandwidthRate 100 MB
RelayBandwidthBurst 100 MB
AccountingMax 5 TB
AccountingStart month 1 00:00
From here, you can run the following to start your node.
systemctl start tor
systemctl enable tor
And your node will be up and running. You can search for your node with the name here: https://metrics.torproject.org/rs.html. Thanks for contributing to the Tor network!