New Remailers Will Need To Generate Some Dummy Traffic
Okay, you followed all the instructions for setting up a YAMN remailer server on a VPS. You tested it with a remailer-key request. And it's working. You announced it on Usenet newsgroup alt.privacy.anon-server. And you're waiting for the pingers to begin adding your remailer to their lists. But you probably noticed that your remailer isn't really doing very much. No activity. Well, that's because it's not yet receiving any messages (except maybe a few pinger messages) and so the message pool is stagnant and traffic is not moving.
The solution to this is to employ a small shell script to generate dummy YAMN messages and inject them into the remailer pool.
As user yamn, move into your yamn folder and download the GenDummy script, gendummy.sh
yamn@remailer:~$ cd ~/yamn
yamn@remailer:~$ wget https://www.sec3.net/yamnhelp/debian/remailer/gendummy.sh
Make the GenDummy script executable:
yamn@remailer:~$ chmod 750 gendummy.sh
Finally, we want to create a cron job that will run this script say, every 11 minutes. So as user yamn, run the command "crontab -e" without the quotations. Add these 2 lines to the file:
# Execute this job every 11 minutes to generate 10 dummies. */11 * * * * /home/yamn/yamn/gendummy.sh 10 &> /dev/null
Save the file and Exit. That cron job will run the script every 11 minutes, generating 10 dummies upon each run, then injecting them into the remailer pool for sending. Thank you to Inwtx for creating the GenDummy script.
This artificial traffic should be enough to keep Yamn processing messages throughout the fledgling days of your remailer's life. It will also act to strengthen your remailer's reliability statistics on the pinger services once your remailer does begin being listed. After a few weeks you can, if you wish, turn the script off since, by then, you should be receiving sufficient real traffic from users and pingers alike. However, there is no harm in keeping gendummy.sh running indefinitely if you wish.
Done!
