- tor-relays - lists.torproject.org

Next Tor Relay operator meetup + MCH activities
by gus 26 Jul '22

26 Jul '22

Hi everyone, This month we won't have our monthly online check-in as many of us are traveling or on vacation mode. But, don't feel sad, we will have two activities this weekend! 1. (livestream): Modernizing the Tor Ecosystem for the Future, 2022-07-24, 15:00-15:50 with Alexander Færøy (ahf), Network Team Lead. Read more: https://program.mch2022.org/mch2021-2020/talk/MUP7MX/ 2. Relay Operator Meetup @ May Contain Hackers (MCH2022) ahf, Artikel10 and many others Tor contributors are at MCH and they are organizing a relay operator meetup! If you are at MCH2022, please get in touch with them!! https://blog.torproject.org/event/mch2022/ The next meetup will be at the end of August. I'll send the invitation at the beginning of August. :) cheers, Gus -- The Tor Project Community Team Lead

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Tor bridges limit
by Me 25 Jul '22

25 Jul '22

Good day all. I am currently running two middle relays on my home network and was wondering if I can add any bridges to my existing set up. I am aware of the limit of two middle relays per ip address but do not see anything stating whether there was any such limit for bridges. I am also not clear on whether the bridges are recognized by the tor network in the same manner as Middle relays and whether the two unit limit applies to the total of devices connected. Thank you in advance for any guidance and always remember.... They are watching

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Relay Overloaded and Dropping Onionskins
by bidulock_ringrose＠aleeas.com 22 Jul '22

22 Jul '22

Greetings! I hope this is the right list to be asking this, if it is not please forgive me. I am purposefully omitting some identifying information for privacy sake. I run 2 non-exit relays both with an advertised bandwidth of around 8 MiB/s each. I have noticed that they have been overloaded a lot lately. These relays have been bottlenecked at the 3-4 MiB/s mark ever since I put them online. Upon further investigation, when I curled the MetricsPort according to https://support.torproject.org/relay-operators/relay-bridge-overloaded/, the following metrics stood out to me. Both relays run on the same machine with the same IP address. I hope the obfuscation makes sense. Side note: I am using Toralf's ddos-inbound script, which has not dropped any connections at all for me when using the -b then -s switch. CPU utilization is high (80%) on one core but low on the rest (5-30%) In the syslog, I also get spammed with "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. [28xxx similar message(s) suppressed in last 34200 seconds]" Relay 1: tor_relay_load_onionskins_total{type="ntor_v3",action="processed"} 750xxxx tor_relay_load_onionskins_total{type="ntor_v3",action="dropped"} 17 tor_relay_load_global_rate_limit_reached_total{side="read"} 6xxxx tor_relay_load_global_rate_limit_reached_total{side="write"} 17xxxx Relay 2: tor_relay_load_onionskins_total{type="ntor_v3",action="processed"} 10xxxxxx tor_relay_load_onionskins_total{type="ntor_v3",action="dropped"} 28xxxx tor_relay_load_global_rate_limit_reached_total{side="read"} 20xxxxx tor_relay_load_global_rate_limit_reached_total{side="write"} 19xxxx All other metrics are normal according to the article on overloaded relays. This runs in a Debian Proxmox VM using the host cpu, so no CPU virtualization. 4 cores, 8GB memory, and AES is supported. It's 2x Xeon 2628v3s with NUMA enabled in the VM (2 sockets, 2 cores per socket). Enabling NUMA and de-virtualizing the CPU has helped increase my top bandwidth by around .7 to .9 mbytes/s, but still not great. Thank you in advance.

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Bridges and Hs_vanguards
by dmz21 12 Jul '22

12 Jul '22

Dear readers, During the last week the bytes/second of my bridge dropped to 20% of its common usage over the past months, while the average number of connected clients stayed the same (according to metrics.torproject.org) I'm also seeing a dozen circuit connections with purpose Hs_vanguards in nyx recently, which are not familiar to me. Under-utilization of my bridge is not a problem to me, but maybe someone can tell me whether the two are related? Maybe it's an issue at my end or my hoster or maybe a generic issue of the tor network currently? Or maybe it's all normal? Thanks and best regards

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We're trying out guard-n-primary-guards-to-use=2
by Roger Dingledine 11 Jul '22

11 Jul '22

Hi folks, As part of the hackweek projects ( https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/community/hackweek/ ), some of us are thinking about simple tweaks we can do to tune the network to better handle this month's traffic overload. The long term answer is to try out proposal 327: https://gitweb.torproject.org/torspec.git/tree/proposals/327-pow-over-intro… because we think a lot of the overload has to do with people sending way too many intro cells to some onion services, and giving the onion services ways to defend themselves is the only real answer. But while we're thinking about implementing that proposal, one of our earlier steps is to set the guard-n-primary-guards-to-use consensus parameter from 1 to 2. Now that it's taken effect (you can watch the votes at https://consensus-health.torproject.org/#consensusparams ), this change means that clients will now choose between two guard relays by default (rather than just one) when building circuits. This is potentially a big deal, since it puts us into a different point in the performance vs safety tradeoff space. Here is some reading for why we originally moved down to 1 guard by default: https://blog.torproject.org/improving-tors-anonymity-changing-guard-paramet… https://www-users.cse.umn.edu/~hoppernj/single_guard.pdf But on the theory that some guards are way overloaded right now and some aren't, giving clients two bites at the apple might make a dramatic improvement in terms of reliable and consistent performance. There is also some argument in favor of using two guards anyway. One reason (explained more in proposal 291) is that there are already some edge cases where clients use their second guard. And also, in the glorious future, we will want to be using multiple guards because we have switched to the multi-path Conflux design (proposal 329) -- though we're not there yet. So: I am giving you all here some early warning, in case you see anything odd on the network when we make this change. Let us know if you do. :) --Roger

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Is ExoneraTor still alive?
by Christian Pietsch 07 Jul '22

07 Jul '22

Dear all, ExoneraTor is/was useful for showing law enforcement authorities that a given IP address acted as a Tor exit relay at a given day. Unfortunately, ExoneraTor seems to be offline. This page does not work at all, returning an HTTP 503 error immediately: https://exonerator.torproject.org/ This page returns the following error whenever I submit an IP address: https://metrics.torproject.org/exonerator.html | Server problem | | Unable to connect to the database. Please try again later. If this problem persists, please let us know! Can it be revived? Can I help? Cheers, Christian -- Christian Pietsch volunteering for Digitalcourage e.V. https://digitalcourage.de/ – Swarm support: https://digitalcourage.de/swarm-support – German BigBrotherAwards: https://bigbrotherawards.de/

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[Event] Tor relay operator meetup - June 25th @ 1900 UTC
by gus 28 Jun '22

28 Jun '22

Hello, The next Tor relay operator meetup will happen on Saturday, June 25 @ 1900 UTC. Where: BigBlueButton - https://tor.meet.coop/gus-og0-x74-dzn No need for a registration or anything else, just use the room-link above. We will open the room 10 minutes before so you can test your mic setup. Everyone is free to bring up additional questions or topics at the meeting itself. Please share with your friends, social media and other mailing lists! cheers, Gus -- The Tor Project Community Team Lead

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Relay "unmeasured" after update to 0.4.7.8
by Martin 27 Jun '22

27 Jun '22

Hi all! After updatering to the latest version, my relay consensus went down to 20 and was marked unmeasured. However it still serves a couple of thousand connections (capped at 10 MB/s) and all flags are still there, but when I try to use it to build a circuit manually it won't let me... Cheers

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Metrics shows my relay down. But it's not.
by Eddie 26 Jun '22

26 Jun '22

The metrics is showing one of my relays (40D13096BBD11AF198CE61DEE4EAECCE5472F2E7) as down for around the last 3 hours. Logging in to it, I see everything running normally. This server has also lost a bunch of flags for no apparent reason, so I'm not sure if they're connected. Cheers.

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FreeBSD 13.1: clock_gettime(CLOCK_MONOTONIC_FAST) ~ 50 % performance gain
by Andreas Kempe 22 Jun '22

22 Jun '22

Hello everyone, I was doing some profiling on my two relays running on FreeBSD 13.1 and noticed that they were spending a lot of time in clock_gettime() which prompted me to have a look at the implementation. Time implementation =================== The time implementation is abstracted in src/lib/time/compat_time.c where different mechanisms are used for different operating systems. On Linux CLOCK_MONOTONIC_COARSE is a clock that gives worse precision than CLOCK_MONOTONIC, but is faster and the abstraction layer checks for its presense and provides more performat less precise time where applicable. On FreeBSD, there is also a fast monotonic time source available called CLOCK_MONOTONIC_FAST. In the header file src/lib/time/compat_time.h, a comment references this clock, but it is not used. I thought it might be worth a shot seeing what difference it would make if I enable the use of CLOCK_MONOTONIC_FAST on FreeBSD and on the VM where I run my two FreeBSD relays, the difference was stunning. I made did a quick patch simply replacing CLOCK_MONOTONIC_COARSE with CLOCK_MONOTONIC_FAST, see patches attached, compiled and tested. Tracing system calls to make sure the correct call was being used, which it was. Results ======= This lead to reducing the CPU usage of the patched relay by about 50 % compared to the unpatched relay. I was a bit shocked so I wrote a small benchmark program and ran it on my VM giving the following results: CLOCK_MONOTONIC: 4.776675 s CLOCK_MONOTONIC_FAST: 0.260002 s Showing that on my VM the performance of CLOCK_MONOTONIC_FAST is about 20 times better than CLOCK_MONOTONIC. I have tested on a few different systems and I think that the performance increase of CLOCK_MONOTONIC_FAST is thanks to commit 60b0ad10dd0fc7ff6892ecc7ba3458482fcc064c - "vdso: lower precision of vdso implementation of CLOCK_MONOTONIC_FAST and CLOCK_UPTIME_FAST" that was cherry-picked to 13.1. Try it yourself and report your results ======================================= If you want to benchmark your server to see whether switching clock could benefit you, you can compile and run my attached test program by doing user>clang -o bench.c -o bench user>./bench In case the program terminates too quickly or slowly for your liking, adjust const unsigned long iterations = 1000000; up or down to change the execution time. My supplied patches appear to work fine on my system, but aren't really upstream appropriate since a solution that works for both FreeBSD and Linux is needed. If you want to test them and you're building Tor from the ports tree, drop them in /usr/ports/security/tor/files and build and install. I'm very interested in seeing some performance data from other people to see whether I think it worth either pestering some Tor devs to have a look at this or putting in some effort myself to write an upstreamable patch. Thank you for reading! Cordially, Andreas Kempe

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From [tor-announce] Tor stable release 0.4.7.8 - Security Fix
by Felix 20 Jun '22

20 Jun '22

> We have released tor 0.4.7.8 earlier today, a new stable version for > the 0.4.7.x series containing an important High severity security > fix. The affected tor are only those of the 0.4.7.x series as in from > tor-0.4.7.1-alpha to tor-0.4.7.7. Jun 18 10:08:46.000 [notice] This version of Tor (0.4.7.8) is newer than any recommended version, according to the directory authorities. -- Cheers Felix

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EXPKEYSIG when running 'apt update'
by Imre Jonk 18 Jun '22

18 Jun '22

Hi tor-relays, I'm getting this error when running 'apt update': Err:4 https://deb.torproject.org/torproject.org bullseye InRelease The following signatures were invalid: EXPKEYSIG 74A941BA219EC810 deb.torproject.org archive signing key The signing key in /etc/apt/trusted.gpg.d/deb.torproject.org-keyring.gpg does not appear to be expired, so I guess some repository metadata signature has expired. Does anyone else encounter this issue? Thanks, Imre

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Identifying a relay
by Eddie 16 Jun '22

16 Jun '22

Have a question about how a server I connect to can tell I am running a guard/middle relay. All I can think of is that they check the published list of tor nodes against the IP. Or (maybe, but unlikely) portscan the IP and probe any open ports to determine the service. Are there any other methods that can be used. Background: The corp my wife works for blocked our IP. The excuse they gave was that it was due to a change made by a vendor they use to identify malicious IP addresses. I have been running the relay for almost 5 years without any previous flagging. They also state that running a middle relay is not in violation of any policy, but the vendor mis-identified our relay as an exit, hence blocking it. After changing the IP, the new IP was also blocked in less than 24 hours. My feeling is that the vendor is now just using the full list of tor nodes and indiscriminately blocking everything, despite what the corp security folks say. I'm looking for some sort of validation I can use to counter their claims.

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(No Subject)
by Admin Platinum Host 15 Jun '22

15 Jun '22

Hi there, I currently own a Tor Relay that has been running since 2022-05-24. A day ago it restarted, which was a bit strange. Recently I found that the Relay has changed to a Guard Relay, which I am pleased about. I was wondering why the restart occurred as the VPS Server has been online since the first start. The Relay is called UKLondonRelay1 with the IP address 80.64.218.62. https://metrics.torproject.org/rs.html#details/B1B1CAD0A73EC5148B06A0A0E819… Any help on this matter would be appreciated. Kind regards, Leon The content of this email is confidential and intended for the recipient specified in message only. It is strictly forbidden to share any part of this message with any third party, without a written consent of the sender. If you received this message by mistake, please reply to this message and follow with its deletion, so that we can ensure such a mistake does not occur in the future.

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[Workshop] Sysadmin 101 for (new) relay operators - June 4th @ 1900 UTC
by gus 15 Jun '22

15 Jun '22

Join us June 4th at 1900 UTC for new and prospective Tor relay and bridge operators on the basic "sysadmin foo" required to contribute to the network! ## Sysadmin 101 for new relay operators So you want to contribute to the open-source Tor network by running a relay or maybe a bridge? The Tor network is the most important tool for evading surveillance and bypassing internet censorship. And Tor relays and bridges are vital to the health and integrity of the Tor network. Millions of users rely on relays and bridges to stay safe, and how you configure and maintain that relay or bridge is critical. Volunteers aren't a nice enhancement. They are a core feature. Running a relay or a bridge raises frequent questions: * Should I run a relay or a bridge? * Should I run a relay or a bridge from a residential/home internet connection? * Which operating system should I run for my Tor node (hint: the one you are most comfortable with securing and maintaining) * More generally, what does it take to keep that relay or bridge operating safely, but both you and Tor users? This workshop will start with a presentation approaching some of the core issues that arise when running a Tor node. The session will move into an "ask me anything" discussion to approach other common and less common questions. The 90-minute event will be geared towards current and prospective Tor bridge and relay operators, particularly those relatively new to running public internet services. Seasoned Linux and BSD Tor operators will be attending the event ready to address the discussion. ## How to join the workshop The workshop is entirely free, and participants need to fill out this registration form. The event will take place on BigBlueButton, an online video conference platform, on June 4th at 1900 - 2030 UTC. You can register here: https://nc.torproject.net/apps/forms/cDLPxryHJcP5kMeW ## Facilitators The workshop will be facilitated by: * George (@gman999) - Tor *BSD Diversity Project member, Serge bridge directory authority maintainer, long-time relay operator and a wide variety of other contributions. * Kushal Das (@kushal) - RPM Tor maintainer and member of the Tor Community team. -- The Tor Project Community Team Lead

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My current node setup
by Nyasaki Server 08 Jun '22

08 Jun '22

Hi to all new ppl that may have joined after the sysadmin101 workshop. I decided to share my setup here in case any newbies are interested and maybe somebody who is doing this for a while longer than me sees any flaws in my setup. Feedback is always welcome! I was tired of using the debian testing for running my node and decided to redo my node with arch because of the fast package updates and rolling release model. Currently my setup consists of 3 servers: Exit-Node: Archlinux with tor, unbound and prometheus running, prometheus is a nice metric collection service that nicely collects the statics that tor exposes. It's a VPS hosted at Terrahost in Norway for 20$ / month with 2 vCPU’s and 4GB Memory. Unbound only resolves requests from localhost, due to a high percentage of DNS timeouts in the past I decided to use this just as backup and resolve everything else via the dedicated DNS server. Tor is set up to expose the metrics to localhost, where prometheus is running. The actual prometheus metrics port is just allowed for 1 IP, thats the one my Dashboard server has. The firewall is set up to allow every port that's listed in my torrc, my non-default ssh port and the IP of my dashboard for the metrics port. DNS: Ubuntu 22.04 LTS (due to oracle clouds small selection of images) with unbound as DNS and prometheus. Hosted at Oracle Cloud via the free tier with 1 vCPU and 1GB Memory. The firewall is open for DNS requests from my node ip, metrics requests from my dashboard IP and non-default ssh port. Dashboard: Ubuntu 22.04 LTS with unbound as DNS and prometheus. Hosted at Oracle Cloud via the free tier with 1 vCPU and 1GB Memory. There's a Grafana dashboard and the Prometheus server running. Again all ports blocked but ssh and http/https are open Image of the Dashboard https://imgur.com/a/fYpRD8O My Node https://metrics.torproject.org/rs.html#details/017342E197B8C575A5C5301CD008… My GPG Key https://keyserver.ubuntu.com/pks/lookup?search=nyasaki.srv%40gmail.com&fing…

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New OrNetStats Section: Largest Bridge Operators
by nusenu 08 Jun '22

08 Jun '22

Hi, OrNetStats got a new section today showing the largest bridge operators by advertised bandwidth grouped by ContactInfo: https://nusenu.github.io/OrNetStats/#bridge-operators-grouped-by-contactinfo This is possible because the Torproject started to publish bridge ContactInfos. The listing only includes operators with at least 50 Mbit/s aggregated advertised bandwidth. AROI support for bridges You can also protect your bridge ContactInfo against spoofing now. The same fields as for relays apply. If you have setup your AROI [1] on your relays already you can simply copy the ContactInfo to your bridges and publish the list of hashed bridge fingerprints under this URL: https://-your-hostname-/.well-known/tor-relay/hashed-bridge-rsa-fingerprint.txt After successful validation your bridges will be added to your operator level pages on OrNetStats. OrNetRadar will also be extended to support bridges. kind regards, nusenu [1] https://nusenu.github.io/OrNetStats/#authenticated-relay-operator-ids -- https://nusenu.github.io

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Error 403 connecting to Sysadmin 101 Workshop
by Eldalië 08 Jun '22

08 Jun '22

Hello there, I'm trying to connect to the Sysadmin 101 Workshop, but after waiting for moderator approval I keep getting the following error (also in the attached image): You have been removed from the meeting User has an invalid sessionToken due to ejection --- 403 Any idea about what's happening here or how to solve it? -- Eldalië My private key is attached. Please, use it and provide me yours!

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Will pay but need someone
by paul＠coffswifi.net 08 Jun '22

08 Jun '22

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[Event] Relay Operators Meetup - May 21, 2022 @ 1900 UTC
by gus 08 Jun '22

08 Jun '22

Hello relay operators, The next Tor relay operator meetup will happen on Saturday, May 21 @ 1900 UTC. Where: BigBlueButton - https://tor.meet.coop/gus-og0-x74-dzn No need for a registration or anything else, just use the room-link above. We're working on the agenda here: https://pad.riseup.net/p/tor-relay-meetup-may-2022-keep Everyone is free to bring up additional questions or topics at the meeting itself. Please share with your friends, social media and other mailing lists! cheers, Gus -- The Tor Project Community Team Lead

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Does Tor work with Intel QAT acceleration
by Andreas Bollhalder 08 Jun '22

08 Jun '22

Hi all I have my first Tor relay up und running. It's currently installed on a little desktop computer with an Intel i5 9500T CPU. My Internet connection is 10Gb/s symetric. From this bandwidth, I would be able to spend a good part for supporting the Tor network. With that little machine, it seems that it would max out at somewhere at ~30 MBytes/s. For my definitive Tor relay hardware, I'm currently researching some options, which would be capable of handling Tor traffic at the rate of 200 to 300MBytes. Even it would be used nowadays, but who knows whats coming in the future and I hope this relay would last 5 years ore so. It looks to me, that with a normal CPU, it's impossible to reach my goal. But then I encountered, that Intel has the Quick Assist Technoloy (QAT) integrated in some of their products (ie. Atom C3xx8). This QAT can be used with OpenSSL as a hardware accelerator for encryption. There also exist dedicated PCIe cards with QAT (ie. Netgate CPIC-8955). Searching the Internet, I couldn't find any information if QAT would be helpful with Tor. But Tor uses the OpenSSL library and this can use the QAT acceleration. Is there anyone who has tried this und can share his expirience? Thanks in advance Andreas

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[warn] Received a bad CERTS cell: Link certificate does not match TLS certificate
by Felix 08 Jun '22

08 Jun '22

Hi all I found a message in the logs: Apr 16 15:07:46.000 [warn] Received a bad CERTS cell: Link certificate does not match TLS certificate -- Cheers Felix

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Debian is not allowing tor to update despite it being listed as a trusted respritory
by Keifer Bly 08 Jun '22

08 Jun '22

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Weird spike in written bytes per second
by Marco Predicatori 08 Jun '22

08 Jun '22

Hi, the graph shows a marked difference between written bytes per second and read bytes per second om 2022-05-19 and 2022-05-20. In any other day the bytes are roughly the same. What might my node have "written" on those two days? https://metrics.torproject.org/rs.html#details/A4E74410D83705EEFF24BC265DE2… Thanks, Marco

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Update on tor issue on my debian
by Keifer Bly 08 Jun '22

08 Jun '22

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