Tor relay on Raspberry 3: OS

Support Relay Operator
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I previously ran a relay on an old Raspberry 1 with Raspbian. Now I got a Raspberry 3 and would set up a relay on that.

I have some clue on how to set up the system so that it avoids writes to the SD card. But I wonder which OS (ideally a Linux distribution) is a good option:

Raspbian, which I used previously, often seems to provide only rather old Tor versions which are not supported anymore by the Tor network.

Unfortunately I have trouble with Arch Linux (which would have solved the previous issue).

Does anybody have better experiences with Linux and Tor relays on a Raspberry?

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If you are used to Debian you could use bullseye-backports to get recentish packages for tor.

Did not try this instructions, but they seem to be accurate:

So please have a look and in the end you should be able to type

apt-get -t bookworm-backports install tor

and get a supported tor version.

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I’m totally okay switching to Debian if it works this way…didn’t think of checking for backports, Thanks for the hint.

bookworm provides tor version 0.4.7.16-1.
The bookworm-backports provide 0.4.8.12-1

I just tried to find out which tor (relay) version is the latest, and which older versions are still accepted by the Tor network – I couldn’t find it quickly. Currently Arch Linux also provides 0.4.8.12-1, and they are usually quite up to date, so the backport’s version seems fine.

So that looks good. I’ll try it out and report.

btw, Tor’s webiste provides relay instructions for Debian, but if Debian’s default Tor version (in “stable”) is regularly out of date, it might make sense to add this as a hint and to recommend backports.

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4

Have you read step 2 of the guide? If you use the torproject debian repository you should always get up to date tor versions.

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Right, I’m not completely sure about this, but I think there was no blog post about this. But it was mentioned in several or relay operator meetups and in the forum. See [tor-relays] PSA: Tor 0.4.7 reaches end of life (EOL) on 2024-01-31.

Actually, if you look closely, step two is about configuring Tor’s project repository, which will always have the latest version available. Additionally, the guide you get redirected to in order to configure the repository, mentions the backports for armhf processors.

6

I’m afraid I didn’t…my bad! I relied somewhat on what I’ve done some years back with an older Raspberry (armhf) and Raspbian, and the instructions I’ve used back then did not mention any backports or a specific Tor repo for Debian. Updating Raspbian regularly left me (mostly) with a supported Tor version, but that was already an issue.

Anyway, the Raspberry Pi OS and tor (I got it from the backports ) are now basically up and running with tor version 0.4.8.12.

Thanks!

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See Tor’s guide for adding their repo to Debian and Debian based systems.

https://support.torproject.org/apt/tor-deb-repo/

This way you can use debian and till keep the latest versions of Tor on your system without a third party software, like essn suggested

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essn didn’t suggest any third party software. Using the official debian repo is just fine as long as the version you get there is still supported/recommended.

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Maybe I misunderstood. I thought bookworm-backports was a third party software. And on the note of the official debian repoitory, when I tried using debian for my relay, I couldn’t, as Tor refused my older Tor version.

I use Arch btw /j

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