- tor-relays - lists.torproject.org

Your computer is too slow to handle this many circuit creation requests
by teamcat＠genocide.fun 07 Oct '22

07 Oct '22

Hello, After setting up a relay, I noticed that my log file was full of "Your computer is too slow to handle this many circuit creation requests" messages. This seems odd to me, as htop reports that my CPU and memory usage is nowhere near full. I'm running on two cores and 8 GB of RAM, and it's averaging about 40% usage on both cores and 2 GB of RAM usage. I've used the tor-ddos iptables rules that were suggested in a previous message thread, but it doesn't seem to have done anything to address the problem. (https://github.com/Enkidu-6/tor-ddos) I've also configured /etc/sysctl.conf to support a traffic flow as outlined in the github repo. Here is the link to the metrics page for my relay. https://metrics.torproject.org/rs.html#details/74181AB4D1A7D403ED9F190FAC92… Is this something that I should be concerned about, and work to mitigate? I am able to migrate my relay to much more powerful hardware, but obviously that would incur additional cost, so if there is some way to fully utilize my existing hardware I would prefer that. Regards, Evan

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(FYI) Rejecting outdated snowflake proxies
by gus 06 Oct '22

06 Oct '22

Hello everyone, As part of scaling snowflake bridge and adding distributed snowflake server support[1], this week the Anti-censorship Team started to reject *outdated* snowflake proxies that can't support this feature (distributed server support). This will result in a loss of 30% of unrestricted NAT proxies. Read below the instructions how to check your snowflake proxy version: - WebExtension: 0.6.2. - Docker: To check the version: $ docker run thetorproject/snowflake-proxy -v should include "-allowed-relay-hostname-pattern" in the output. To update: $ docker pull thetorproject/snowflake-proxy - Standalone with Go Toolchain: To check the version: $ proxy -v should include "-allowed-relay-hostname-pattern" in the output. To update: $ go install git.torproject.org/pluggable-transports/snowflake.git/v2/proxy@latest If you need help, please check this Forum post: https://forum.torproject.net/t/please-update-your-snowflake-proxy-to-help-u… Thank you! gus [1] https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snow… -- The Tor Project Community Team Lead

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Consensus weight tanking
by Me 06 Oct '22

06 Oct '22

Good day, Not sure if this would be the proper avenue to pursue this. I operate a couple of middle relays from my home server. All seemed well until this morning. Three days ago one was promoted to guard status while the other lags behind. This morning I check the Tor metrics page and the consensus weight graphs on both relays have bottomed out. The other metrics do not have appeared to have remained normal for daily operations. Any suggestions or input are greatly appreciated

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Moving middle relays to bridges?
by Isaac Grover, Aileron I.T. 05 Oct '22

05 Oct '22

Good morning, According to tor metrics, there have been nearly three times the number of relays as bridges over the last three months so I would like to move my handful of middle relays to bridges. They will keep their same IP address. Is there a best practice with regards to doing this so the directories don't get confused? Make your day great, Isaac Grover

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Thoughts about potentially abusive config option for exit nodes
by abuse-node49＠posteo.de 03 Oct '22

03 Oct '22

I did not manage to find anywhere on the new website the current config options of the torrc. So I ask the question here, although it may be already outdated. This is the third time I have had contact with the police about Exits Relays. That's why it occurred to me that someone might be acting targeted, because I run more than one node. Looking for configurations that allow dedicated IP addresses, I found the torrc-config option 'StrictNodes 1' in conjunction with 'ExitNodes [IP/Nickname/Key]' on the web. There were also hints that something had been changed before, but I tried it on a local installation. The goal was to use a specific exit address. StrictNodes 1 ExitNodes [MY_EXIT_NODE_IP] First I had a typo and the Tor service did not start. After the correction it worked and I got into the network. The conclusion remained that Tor accepts these configuration lines. The problem with this is, should this config line really allow a dedicated exit as the sole exit point into the network, the operator of that exit could be targeted and harmed with illegal traffic. In Metrics it is easy to show whole Tor families that always belong to a single operator. It would be nice if the developers remove the possibility to specify a dedicated IP address/nickname/key, if not already done. The config option 'Exitnodes {COUNTRY_CODE}' should remain though. Kind regards, Olaf

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bridge distribution
by potlatch 28 Sep '22

28 Sep '22

[0] FB45183DD82D572CA2B2641C1AB0EB0D8CE7B858 Sent with [Proton Mail](https://proton.me/) secure email.

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bridge distribution
by potlatch 24 Sep '22

24 Sep '22

People, I have a bridge [0] with a bridge distribution mechanism of "non". It's been that way since May 2022. What gives? Should I remove it from the network as unless> potlatch Sent with [Proton Mail](https://proton.me/) secure email.

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Best practices for the hosting provider of Tor exit nodes?
by Isaac Grover, Aileron I.T. 15 Sep '22

15 Sep '22

Good afternoon, As I'm reaching out to hosting providers worldwide to see if hosting Tor exit nodes is within their ToS and AUP, most hosting providers are requesting hardware specifications and bandwidth requirements; however, I would like to point them to a resource showing best practices for the hosting provider, and maybe one that shows expectations of the Tor exit node operator as well - for example SWIP'ing the IP address(es) to the exit node operator - so that the hosting provider knows what the exit node operator expects of them, and what they should expect of the exit node operator. Does such a resource exist, and if not, what would you request/add in such a resource? Make your day great, Isaac Grover

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knock knock, police is here
by volker.mink＠gmx.de 13 Sep '22

13 Sep '22

Hi folks. On Tuesday morning police knocked on my door, performing a full house search. Some Nazis used TOR to send nazi-emails to several schools in Germany. Unfortunately their mails left one of my Exit Servers from dark- to clearweb, so an ip address, registered on my name, was the last stamp. Now im accused of Volksverhetzung (german, try to find a good translation). It means spreading bad nazi bullshit to the internet. I can take this down by showing them German Telemediengesetz §8, which protects TOR operators in Germany. Unfortunately they found some dope (yea, 420guy here) during the house search, which makes thing even more complicated. Now I am considering shutting down all my exits. I promise you guys, there is nothing more bad than a police house search in the early morning hourse. Even a burglary would be less worse. Burglars come, steal, go and you never hear again from them. Police comes, searches through all your belongings, destroys your privacy, is allowed to take ALL what they want - and they will send you bad bad letters afterwards. What are your thoughts about this? Best regards, volker

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a characteristic of recent attacks?
by Scott Bennett 01 Sep '22

01 Sep '22

The vast majority of recent surges of unusual activity on my humble relay, which I take as likely being attacks, result in large changes in the hour-to-hour statistic shown below in these lines extracted from the hourly heartbeat message groups. Aug 31 19:02:28.549 [notice] Heartbeat: DoS mitigation since startup: 15 circuits killed with too many cells, 0 circuits rejected, 0 marked addresses, 14 same address concurrent connections rejected, 0 connections rejected, 5 single hop clients refused, 1706742 INTRODUCE2 rejected. Aug 31 20:02:28.546 [notice] Heartbeat: DoS mitigation since startup: 15 circuits killed with too many cells, 0 circuits rejected, 0 marked addresses, 14 same address concurrent connections rejected, 0 connections rejected, 5 single hop clients refused, 1706742 INTRODUCE2 rejected. Aug 31 21:02:28.549 [notice] Heartbeat: DoS mitigation since startup: 15 circuits killed with too many cells, 0 circuits rejected, 0 marked addresses, 14 same address concurrent connections rejected, 0 connections rejected, 5 single hop clients refused, 1706742 INTRODUCE2 rejected. Aug 31 22:02:28.544 [notice] Heartbeat: DoS mitigation since startup: 15 circuits killed with too many cells, 0 circuits rejected, 0 marked addresses, 14 same address concurrent connections rejected, 0 connections rejected, 5 single hop clients refused, 1770970 INTRODUCE2 rejected. Aug 31 23:02:28.556 [notice] Heartbeat: DoS mitigation since startup: 16 circuits killed with too many cells, 0 circuits rejected, 0 marked addresses, 14 same address concurrent connections rejected, 0 connections rejected, 5 single hop clients refused, 2013266 INTRODUCE2 rejected. The most recent such surge appears to have ended less than an hour ago. Note that there was no change in the count of "INTRODUCE2 rejected" for many hours leading up to the onset of unusual activity, though I've only shown three prior hours' worth. Then there is an increase of 63227 in this count during the first hour and another 41296 during the second hour. Often during these periods the input appears to be maxed out, and sometimes the output rate is still higher by several hundred KB/s. My question is, do other relay operators whose relays are being attacked see the same phenomenon? In addition, if someone knows of an effective way to turn such things aside at less cost than be simply leaving them to tor to deal with, I'd love to know about it, too, though I suspect there may be no such method. Thanks in advance for any relevant information! Scott Bennett, Comm. ASMELG, CFIAG ********************************************************************** * Internet: bennett at sdf.org *xor* bennett at freeshell.org * *--------------------------------------------------------------------* * "A well regulated and disciplined militia, is at all times a good * * objection to the introduction of that bane of all free governments * * -- a standing army." * * -- Gov. John Hancock, New York Journal, 28 January 1790 * **********************************************************************

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One of my relays does not get a "consensus weight" value and is not in the list.
by failing.flyaway443＠mailer.me 30 Aug '22

30 Aug '22

Hello everyone, I have a question about another relay I deployed a few days ago. This time I set up two relays on a server with only one IP address, almost simultaneously. They are "Infinity1" and "Infinity2". I kept looking at the Relay Search to see how everything was going, and Infinity1 already has a consensus weight of 36000, but Infinity2's value is still at 1. So I looked at the big consensus list, and sure enough, it only has Infinity1 in it. Could it be that the Directory Authorities do not accept Infinity2 for some reason, or should I just be patient a bit longer? I also noticed that Infinity1 is already moving an average of 15Mb/s of traffic, while Infinity2 is still hanging around in the Kb range. Of course I did everything correctly, MyFamily and ContactInfo are set. Does anyone here know what this could be? The fingerprint of Infinity2 is 9F459D4756AA61D7ED05D000EA4C757FA19AC401. Thank you everyone for taking the time to think about this for a moment and have a great day to you all! Best

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OOM Bytes Cell
by Nyasaki Server 29 Aug '22

29 Aug '22

Hi, my node is running for a while now, today I noticed that the cell oom bytes has risen, which never happened before. Is this concerning? What does the cell value mean? Im thankful for every input! BR Nyasaki

1 0

Closing relay
by Ole Rydahl 29 Aug '22

29 Aug '22

Since 2014 I have run a non-exit relay at my premises. However ultimo July the system load increased abruptly. Idle-cpu -typically 60-70% - dropped to 30%, _and_ with frequent drops to 0! I reduced the max bandwidth to 1.2 Mbytes. That reduces the load somewhat but still with frequent spikes where the idle-cpu hits 0 and I get the "relay too slow" indication. Any suggestions? /Ole Rydahl https://metrics.torproject.org/rs.html#details/CE1FD7659F2DFE92B883083C0C6C9 74616D17F3D

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Overload
by sysmanager7 27 Aug '22

27 Aug '22

Another New one: 19:01:09 [NOTICE] General overload -> Ntor dropped (176948) fraction 25.2668% is above threshold of 0.5000% â 17:19:32 [WARN] Your computer is too slow to handle this many circuit creation requests! Please consider using the MaxAdvertisedBandwidth â config option or choosing a more restricted exit policy. Any Ideas?? What is the syntax for MaxAdvertisedBandwidth? Currently is: MaxAdvertisedBandwidth 3Mb Sysmanager Sent with [Proton Mail](https://proton.me/) secure email.

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missing IPv6 close events
by Toralf Förster 27 Aug '22

27 Aug '22

Playing with Python and Stem I wrote a script to monitor the ORStatus.CLOSED event reasons [1]. A helper script [2] gives statistics from those data. From the last 2 days I got: $> orstatus-stats.sh /tmp/orstatus.29051 CONNECTRESET 6197 CONNECTRESET 13214 DONE 18769 IOERROR 58 NOROUTE 1661 TIMEOUT 2562 TLS_ERROR 42461 I was wondering if it is expected that DONE is just a 1/4 of all reasons. And I do wonder why all events are IPv4 only. [1] https://github.com/toralf/torutils/blob/main/orstatus.py [2] https://github.com/toralf/torutils/blob/main/orstatus-stats.sh -- Toralf

1 0

Warn:
by sysmanager7 24 Aug '22

24 Aug '22

I got the below message on my relay #2. It's been in operation for a year and a half. First time I've ever got one of these. 0re7:26:40 [WARN] Your computer is too slow to handle this many circuit creation requests! Please consider using the MaxAdvertisedBandwidth config option or choosing a more restricted exit policy. [505 similar message(s) suppssed in last 57840 seconds] OK > Both relays operate on Digital Ocean Droplets Bandwidth on both 2 MBs Burst 3MBs both relays have the same settings NEITHER is an exit: ExitPolicy reject I see relay #2 has been restarted. Last eve it had been up four days. As of this writing just over 2 hours. Or is this another way to muck up a relay? Sysmanager Sent with [Proton Mail](https://proton.me/) secure email.

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We need much more bridges with obfs4 and iat-mode set to 1 or 2..barely can't find any.
by elise.toradin＠web.de 24 Aug '22

24 Aug '22

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Strange entries in notices.log
by toritdown 23 Aug '22

23 Aug '22

I am suddenly finding numerous entries in my /var/log/tor/notices log that look like this: Aug 22 01:21:46.000 [warn] Unable to store router descriptor Aug 22 01:21:46.000 [warn] Error writing to "/var/lib/tor/cached-descriptors.new": No space left on device What does this mean? What do I need to do about? Sent with [Proton Mail](https://proton.me/) secure email.

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Relays spamming my OR port
by Logforme 19 Aug '22

19 Aug '22

I run the relay 8F6A78B1EA917F2BF221E87D14361C050A70CCC3 I have tried to mitigate the current DoS by implemented connection limits in my iptables using Toralf's template: More than 25 connection during 10 mins and you end up on my naughty list. Lots of connection attempts from the naughty list dropped but still my relay gets "overloaded" However, I have noticed that a few relays also end up on the naughty list, and I wonder how that can happen. My understanding is that a relay will only open 1 connection to another relay so should therefore never end up on the list. Correct? D767979FE4C99D310A46EC49037E9FE7E3F64E9D is a particularly frequent naughty boy. Maybe these relays disconnect and reconnect to my relay frequently due to network issues (effect from the DoS?) or from not having enough connections available on the router? I guess my real question is if these connections are legit and I'm hurting the Tor network by using connection limits?

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Metrics falsely showing my relay as offline
by Eddie 19 Aug '22

19 Aug '22

I have 1 relay (40D13096BBD11AF198CE61DEE4EAECCE5472F2E7) that according to the metrics is always bouncing between online and offline, sometimes multiple times per day. The logs show it running the whole time and when the metrics also show it running, the uptime continues to increase correctly. This hasn't always been the case, as the history shows this didn't happen prior to around June based on the guard flag usage. This relay is hosted at AWS if that makes any difference. Should I care about this, because the relay is running correctly. It's just that it never gets the stable (long running) and guard flags any more because of this yo-yo effect, which I'm sure is affecting how the relay is allocated circuits. I do have another relay (E823B5F000835A669E902EBAE5ECCB9A324F46C9) that sometimes exhibits the same issues, but to a much lesser extent. Like it will show offline (maybe) once a month for a very short period and any flags lost are quickly regained.

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[New Initiative] Tor Weather: Improving the Tor Weather
by Sarthik Gupta 18 Aug '22

18 Aug '22

Hello everyone, As we all know, nodes are the building blocks of the tor-network. More often than not these nodes require some maintenance, which could be in the form of software upgrades, troubleshooting issues, rebooting the relays in case of failures, etc. As of today, if any relay disappears from the tor-network, no one will know. Tor-Weather aims at solving this by creating a notification service which relay operators can subscribe to in order to get various types of updates for their relays. The tor-weather service will offer a plethora of notifications options for the relays. These include, the node being down, running on EOL/Outdated version, losing a flag, ranking in top 20/50/100, etc. These notifications can be subscribed & customized by the relay operators to fit their needs using a web-frontend. Folks interested in the project can refer this <https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-dev/2022-May/014734.html> thread in the tor-dev mailing list for regular updates. Suggestions are always welcomed! Please reach out to us in irc (#tor-dev) for any ideas, questions, or suggestions you might have. Thanks, Sarthik Gupta

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easy way to test my exit policy
by Tom Yates 18 Aug '22

18 Aug '22

i've been grumbled at in a way that makes me want to validate my exit policy before dismissing the grumble. is there any easy way to check that, as a tor client, i can't make an outbound connection from my tor server to a particular port on a particular server? i suppose i'm asking if there's a tor-aware telnet, or equivalent. how do people test their exit policies? -- Tom Yates - https://www.teaparty.net

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tor relay over wifi
by andrew reid 17 Aug '22

17 Aug '22

hi i am running a tor relay on an old phone over wifi. is this a bad idea ?

1 0

Have you experienced DDoS?
by Viktor Nikolov 15 Aug '22

15 Aug '22

Hi! My provider of server housing disconneded today at about 12:00 CET my server running two guard relays because of "very strong attack; top traffic was in tens of GBps and threatened both our internal network infrastructure, as well as the availability of the provided services for other customers; number of network flows according to monitoring was between 3-4M." My normal traffic is max. 600 Mbps and few tens of thousands connections. They will come back to me during the office hours of Monday. :-( Was somebody else also subject to DDoS today? Viktor

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Flags gone after restart
by andrew reid 11 Aug '22

11 Aug '22

Hey there, I am running a tor relay off an old samsung phone. When I first started the relay, my observed bandwidth was around 4.5MB/s. It was running for around 7 days and had the stable and HSdir flag. After a few problems with IP6 and being overloaded (thought this was a problem on my end, not a DDoS attack) I restarted the phone and edited the config file to take away IPv6. It has now been running for 7 days again but my observed bandwidth is only 1.6MB/s now and I still haven't gotten the stable and HSdir flag back. How long would this take or is it just a problem on my end ? and for the bandwidth, my connection is still the same and hasn't changed. Is this just something that takes time to come back like the flags. This is my first relay so I would like to understand a bit more. Thank you

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