LonnieOlson

The flat green plateau was a bittorrent I left on, and the massive mountain is Tor.

Last week I used quite a bit of bandwidth on my colocated server. Part of it was due to leaving a bittorrent of a few episodes of “Weeds” running for a few days. Those sure are popular, but I have the max upload rate limited to 800KBps. Not enough to cause problems, but enough to share my generous amount of bandwidth.

While Bittorrent can eat up quite a bit of bandwidth, it wasn’t the culprit. The problem was Tor! I misread the documentation for BandwidthRate and BandwidthBurst. I thought it was in bps (bits), but, in fact, it was in Bps (bytes). Whoops! When I was going through the normal everyday sysadmin duties I noticed that our primary backbone link was a lot closer to being full than it normally should be. A little poking around and I found that my own server was eating up about 14Mbps. I shut it off immediately, and headed for the documentation. To my surprise FAQ 5.17 is very clear about the units for the BandwidthRate. I am a total idiot. Config fixed, tor restarted.

I am not one of those privacy nuts that won’t do anything that isn’t anonymized or encrypted. In fact I tried using tor myself for about 2 minutes. It was painfully slow. I don’t really care who sees most of my traffic, and the traffic I do care about is already either SSL’d or ssh tunneled. However, I understand the occasional need for tor, and it’s obvious benefits. Since I have so much bandwidth available that no one will be using, I thought I would share. Ain’t it nice to be sysadmin of your own ISP.

Interesting note: So far in the first 10 days of this month I have used 981GB on my server. Holy bejeezus