[Remops] Locally or remotely administered?
Brian O'Connor
Kieslowski at diabpetition.org
Mon Aug 5 18:35:41 BST 2013
Hello!
I'm new to the list, but not new to remailers. I use to be a very active
user back in the day (orange, xganon, licious, winter, etc) Then my
interest waned. But now I'm interested again. It's 2013. Anonymous
speech has never been more vital. And, as in the past, I have been
investigating the possibilities of operating a public remailer myself.
It used to be far more feasible to run an email service from inside
one's home. For my situation at least, it wouldn't work. My ISP blocks
port 25, doesn't allow servers and, even without those roadblocks, my IP
address would surely end up being blacklisted (if it isn't already) for
the mere sin of being in a block of IPs reserved for non-commercials
customers of an Internet provider. (Thanks, spammers, for ruining the
Net for the rest of us.)
Over the years I've slowly become more assured using debian and a
command line interface. Lately, I hve been shopping for a VPS host
(virtual private server). It would be affordable (a colo or a dedicated
server would be out of my price range) but many of the VPS hosts I've
contacted are not willing to host a remailer. Not even a middleman.
The few that are willing seem slightly leery of my intentions and don't
give me a lot of confidence. They seem to interpret heavy MTA traffic as
"bulk email" and bulk email to them means spam. I can envision a time
when my remailer first goes live. The traffic would jump dramatically
and my hosting provider would react to it, likely shutting me down for
"spamming", "excessive cpu usage" or whatever reason they might choose.
I'm interested to hear from anyone on the list who has faced these sorts
of dilemma and how they sorted them.
Another question:
If mixmaster is being administered remotely, e.g. at a VPS host, how
does one keep secring.mix, secring.pgp and other confidential files
secure and away from prying eyes? Enc-FS? Is such a scenario even
recommended? 'Doesn't feel very secure.
Cheers,
Brian
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