I have a remote server running Ubuntu that I rarely use. I pay something like thirty bucks a month to have it and really only use it as a squid proxy to get around my office’s firewall and in public wifi situations where I might need some privacy.

I’ve been using the anonymous proxy service, Tor for about three years. I don’t use it regularly, but I like having it around and knowing it’s there to use. Every once and a while, I see a reason to use it, but it’s the idea of Tor that has me installing it on all my computers.

So, I decided that I should install Tor on my underused server to give a little back to the service. By installing Tor, my server joins the many others out there, providing anonymous gateways to the web, without leaving traces. I’ve no idea what people may do using Tor through my server—be it shady or innocent, which is good because this lack of knowledge keeps me from being liable for any misuse.

While I was going through the grind of getting Tor running properly, I also decided to install Boinc, or the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (phew!). I’ve been contributing to the Seti@home project, assisting in the search for extraterrestrial intellignece for about four years with my desktop computers. Since the server is always on, I figured it was a great idea. Trying to run a boinc client via command line is pretty fucking annoying, but once I found a decent howto, I was up and running pretty fast.

I also attached the boinc client on my server to the Rosetta@home project, calculating the 3-dimensional shapes of proteins so that researches can hopefully find some cures for various diseases.

Fun.