Hardware and Settings in Home Environment

Support Relay Operator
1

Hi,

I recently upgraded my home-network from an old FritzBox 7490 to a Unifi CGU. We currently have 70mbit down and 30mbit upstream, but sometime next year we’ll get fiber.

I operate a small middle-relay on a Pi 3b+ with bandwith restrictions to:

  • RelayBandwidthRate 3200 KB # Throttle traffic to 25.6 Mbit/s
  • RelayBandwidthBurst 3800 KB # But allow bursts up to 30.4 Mbit/s

As this Pi recently had some lan-issues, I was thinking about new hardware. Should be cheap (higher WAF), but also capable of scaling when we get fiber. A few questions about that:

Any hardware suggestions? (edit: I just shot via ebay for 110€: Dell Optiplex 3070 Micro,Intel i5-2,20 GHz, 256GB NVMe, 8GB RAM, WIN 11 Pro)

Which OS to go?

Please advice about max bandwith rate which still has enough room for streaming etc.

Should it be in a separate VLAN? We don’t have VLANs yet, but with Unifi that shouldn’t be an issue.

Is it better for the network if I create multiple small relays or one strong? It`s in Belgium, which only has a small community..

Thanks and best regards

T4H

2

I have the same question about what hardware to use for a home TOR relay to share spare bandwidth. Seeing the hardware you mentioned (€110), I wonder if that’s efficient. For €3–5/month you can get a cheap VPS with unmetered bandwidth, which greatly reduces upfront costs and avoids hardware maintenance.