Hardened Tor Middle/Guard Relay on Anubiz Iceland
Iceland sits on multiple submarine cables to Europe and North America and has constitutional press freedom guarantees, which makes it one of the more useful jurisdictions for relays that need to stay up. This walkthrough assumes you already provisioned an Anubiz Iceland VPS III and want a fast middle or guard relay with proper kernel tuning, persistent identity keys and an nftables ruleset that does not break the consensus.
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Why Iceland for a Relay
Press freedom law, strong courts and submarine cable diversity mean a relay in Reykjavik gets to and from North America and Europe quickly. The Anubiz Iceland VPS III has the bandwidth headroom (10-32 TB monthly depending on tier) to push 30-50 Mbit/s sustained without throttling.
Step 1: Base OS Hygiene
Rotate the initial credential, push your SSH key, disable password login. Set timezone to UTC for clean logs. Enable BBR for outbound throughput: in /etc/sysctl.d/99-tor.conf set net.core.default_qdisc=fq and net.ipv4.tcp_congestion_control=bbr. Bump file descriptors via LimitNOFILE=65535 in a tor systemd drop-in.
Step 2: torrc
Install tor from torproject.org repo. In /etc/tor/torrc set ORPort 443, ORPort [::]:443, SocksPort 0, ExitRelay 0, Nickname anubizIS<n>, ContactInfo with a real address you check, RelayBandwidthRate 30 MBytes, RelayBandwidthBurst 45 MBytes. Optional: add an obfs4 bridge transport on a second port if you also want to help censored users.
Step 3: Firewall
nftables: accept SSH from your jump host CIDR, accept tcp dport 443 from world, accept ICMP, drop the rest. Do not block outbound or the relay cannot fetch the consensus and will be marked unreachable.
Step 4: Persist the Identity
Tor will earn the Guard flag only after weeks of stable uptime, so the identity keys in /var/lib/tor/keys are valuable. Back them up offline before any rebuild. Reinstalling without restoring keys forces a brand new fingerprint and loses your reputation.
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