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Onionbalance v2 Installation Guide

Warning

This section refers to the older v2 codebase. Although outdated, it's still available for historic purposes.

Onionbalance implements round-robin like load balancing on top of Tor onion services. A typical Onionbalance deployment will incorporate one management servers and multiple backend application servers.

Architecture

The management server runs the Onionbalance daemon. Onionbalance combines the routing information (the introduction points) for multiple backend onion services instances and publishes this information in a master descriptor.

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The backend application servers run a standard Tor onion service. When a client connects to the public onion service they select one of the introduction points at random. When the introduction circuit completes the user is connected to the corresponding backend instance.

  • Management Server: is the machine running the Onionbalance daemon. It needs to have access to the onion service private key corresponding for the desired onion address. This is the public onion address that users will request.

This machine can be located geographically isolated from the machines hosting the onion service content. It does not need to serve any content.

  • Backend Instance: each backend application server runs a Tor onion service with a unique onion service key.

Note

The onionbalance-config tool can be used to quickly generate keys and config files for your Onionbalance deployment.

The Onionbalance tool provide two command line tools:

onionbalance acts as a long running daemon.

onionbalance-config is a helper utility which eases the process of creating keys and configuration files for onionbalance and the backend Tor instances.

Getting Started

To get started with setting up Onionbalance, please go to Installing Oniobalance (v2).