BitTorrent

It's really easy to help Tails users downloading it over BitTorrent... especially if you are already a BitTorrent user.

1. Get the latest BitTorrent files

Here are the latest available BitTorrent files:

2. Share Tails images

Feed your preferred BitTorrent client with the .torrent files downloaded at the previous step. Make sure you open and/or forward the needed ports in your router and/or firewall configuration so that you are a real seed.

3. Stay tuned!

As a contributor to Tails availability over BitTorrent, it is very important you share the very latest published version, and only this one: users need to be able to quickly download it and upgrade when we release security fixes, and there is no need to help propagate outdated versions with security flaws.

A way to do this is to configure software to automatically download and seed Tails over BitTorrent.

Else, new versions are announced on:

• our news mailing-list
• our RSS and Atom feeds that announce new available BitTorrent files.

HTTP

To efficiently help Tails users downloading it over HTTP, one needs to have sufficiently privileged access to a web server with decent bandwidth: a domestic DSL connection won't help; neither will a shared web hosting setup that provides FTP access only.

To give you an idea, a few dedicated Mb/s is a must; you must expect pushing at least 50-100GB GiB (bytes, not bits) on a normal day, and twice as much for a short period after each release. So, it is a must to be able to push at least 2 TiB a month, and preferably 3 or 4 TiB.

You will also need around 5-10 GiB of disk space.

If you satisfy these practical requirements, please read on! Else, please consider seeding Tails images over BitTorrent instead.

Before starting doing any real work on this topic, please get in touch (tails@boum.org, OpenPGP key) and send us your OpenPGP public key, so that any further communication between us can be properly encrypted and authenticated.

1. The big picture

We have a DNS Round Robin setup for the dl.amnesia.boum.org host.

Every HTTP mirror makes our files available under a fixed URL (http://dl.amnesia.boum.org/tails/) that contains per-version sub-directories (such as http://dl.amnesia.boum.org/tails/stable/tails-i386-lenny-0.6.2/).

2. Set up your web server

You need to set up a virtual host for dl.amnesia.boum.org, with indexing enabled.

Apache configuration example

<VirtualHost YOUR_WEBSERVER_IP:80>
   ServerName dl.amnesia.boum.org
   ServerAdmin YOUR_EMAIL

   DocumentRoot /var/www/THE_PLACE_WHERE_YOU_WANT_OUR_FILES_TO_LIVE/
   <Directory /var/www/THE_PLACE_WHERE_YOU_WANT_OUR_FILES_TO_LIVE/>
      Options Indexes
      AllowOverride None
      IndexIgnore README.html
      IndexOptions FancyIndexing FoldersFirst IgnoreCase NameWidth=50
      IndexOrderDefault Descending Date
   </Directory>
</VirtualHost>

Lighttpd configuration example

$HTTP["host"] =~ "^dl\.amnesia\.boum\.org$" {
    server.document-root = "/var/www/THE_PLACE_WHERE_YOU_WANT_OUR_FILES_TO_LIVE/"
    server.dir-listing = "enable"
}

nginx configuration example

server {
    server_name dl.amnesia.boum.org;
    root /var/www/THE_PLACE_WHERE_YOU_WANT_OUR_FILES_TO_LIVE;
    location / {
        autoindex on;
    }
}

3. Download the files

Download a snapshot of the current Tails files:

rsync -rt --delete \
         rsync.torproject.org::amnesia-archive \
         /var/www/THE_PLACE_WHERE_YOU_WANT_OUR_FILES_TO_LIVE/

If you have disk space limitations, you might want to exclude the /tails/obsolete folder (which contains old versions of Tails) from the download:

rsync -rt --delete --exclude=/tails/obsolete --delete-excluded \
         rsync.torproject.org::amnesia-archive \
         /var/www/THE_PLACE_WHERE_YOU_WANT_OUR_FILES_TO_LIVE/

4. Schedule the pulling of the files

Secondary mirrors (like yours) should sync every hour + 15 minutes. Use cron or equivalent to schedule the same rsync command as above.

5. Go wild

As soon as your web server is ready, please e-mail us its IP address so that we can ask the DNS server admins to add it to the Round Robin pool.

Talk to us

If you want to talk in public with other Tails developers and users:

• You can subscribe or write to the tails-dev@boum.org mailing-list. Any message sent to this list is stored in a public archive, so beware of what your email content and headers reveal about yourself: location, IP address, etc.
• You can join our #tails and #tails-dev chatrooms; note: only a few Tails core developers hang out there, so email is preferred for anything that might be of interest for the larger Tails development community.
• For translation-related matters, you can subscribe or write to the tails-l10n@boum.org mailing-list. Any message sent to this list is stored in a public archive, so beware of what your email content and headers reveal about yourself: location, IP address, etc.
• For user experience and user interface related matters, you can subscribe or write to the tails-ux@boum.org mailing-list. Any message sent to this list is stored in a public archive, so beware of what your email content and headers reveal about yourself: location, IP address, etc.

For matters that need to be hidden from the public eyes, email the private development mailing list: tails@boum.org. To achieve end-to-end encryption, encrypt such email with our OpenPGP key.