NILIn this fourth Tor article, I will _quickly_ cover how to run a Tor relay, the
Tor project already have a very nice and up-to-date Guide for setting a relay.
Those relays are what make Tor usable, with more relay, Tor gets more bandwidth
and it makes you harder to trace, because that would mean more traffic to
analyze.
A relay server can be an **exit node**, which will relay Tor traffic to the
outside. This implies a lot of legal issues, the Tor project foundation offers
to help you if your exit node gets you in trouble.
Remember that being an exit node is **optional**. Most relays are not exit
nodes. They will either relay traffic between relays, or become a **guard**
which is an entry point to the Tor network. The guard gets the request over
non-tor network and send it to the next relay of the user circuit.
Running a relay requires a lot of CPU (capable of some crypto) and a huge
amount of bandwidth. Running a relay requires at least a bandwidth of 10Mb/s,
this is a minimal requirement. If you have less, you can still run a bridge
with obfs4 but I won't cover it here.
When running a relay, you will be able to set a daily/weekly/monthly traffic
limit, so your relay will stop relaying when it reach the quota. It's quiet
useful if you don't have unmeasured bandwidth, you can also limit the bandwidth
allowed to Tor.
To get real-time information about your relay, the software Nyx (net/nyx) is a
Tor top-like front end which show Tor CPU usage, bandwidth, connections, log in
real time.
[The awesome Official Tor guide](https://blog.torproject.org/new-guide-running-tor-relay)