I have noticed a new type of cloud service called a seedbox. it is a remote control torrent server located in country with lax internet laws. I think that tribler exit nodes should be shifted to professional seedboxes running on bulletproof hosting, or by people who have a foreign VPN connection. I would like to see a VPN kill switch that can be configured to kill the exit node when the VPN connection drops. I would also like to see a headless tribler that I can run on a bulletproof hosting provider. We could even begin to see commercial exit nodes on the tribler network if people were allowed to sell trust tokens. I would happily sell mine for Monero.
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You’re not the first person to nibble around the edges of this subject.
Running a Tribler seedbox would be difficult at this time. Most seedboxen are headless and don’t have X.org installed. This means that if the application you’re trying to use doesn’t have a web interface option it can be problematic to run: you can often get GUI apps to launch on Linux without having X.org, but it’s almost impossible to access the interface to actually use it without being able to install a VNC X.org server or something similar.
The reason why I had asked the multiple instances question was as a work-around to this issue: if you can start a Tribler instance and configure it as an exit node on a seedbox and then use the same tokens on your home instance of Tribler (i.e. earn credit on the seedbox and spend that credit on your home instance) it solves many issues, including how you get the files home so you can access them; if you download files to a seedbox you still need a secure method to get them home before you get to actually use them.
The perfect solution is to release a version of Tribler with a server/client model, with a client that can connect to multiple servers at once (and synchronise their token credit/debt between server instances): then you just run the server instance on the seedbox and a client and server at home. Or download to the seedbox and use SFTP to get it home, but that seems like double handling: there is no real need for the files you want at home to ever be on the seedbox itself. If the seedbox server instance never handles files then 100% of the traffic it serves will be the exit node function, and then the home server instance can be used to get the files you actually want at home and re-share those files back to the network. After-all, the majority of your media collection will be at home, so that’s the logical place to share files from.
The next best option is a web interface for the current client, and an option to start Tribler with just the web interface and then use SFTP to get the files home.
Barring all of that, as you suggest the VPN method is a option, but the lack of a VPN killswitch is a massive deterrent to even starting down that path. There is a workaround for that: run the VPN router in a VM and configure that VM to only have routes to the internet that correspond to the VPN endpoints. That way, when the VPN goes down the box stops being able to access the internet in general. Then you create another VM for Tribler itself, and use the VPN VM as the default gateway for the Tribler VM. It means running two VMs, and is very clunky, but it would work, but it’s not as elegant or efficient as a client/server version of Tribler would be.