- tor-relays - lists.torproject.org

tor 0.4.6 reached end of life
by nusenu 01 Aug '22

01 Aug '22

If you still run tor 0.4.6, now is a good time to upgrade your tor version. the list of largest operators still running end of life tor versions: https://nusenu.github.io/OrNetStats/#end-of-life-relays-share -- https://nusenu.github.io

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An attempt to block spam ip addresses
by Toralf Förster 01 Aug '22

01 Aug '22

Issue 40636 and others deal with DDoS / concurrent connections. Here're few numbers from my attempt [1] of the last days to block such ip addresses. The stats are from 2 relays running at the same ip. Currently there're 700 ip addresses (15 IPv6) caught in the denylist. Those either opened >4 connections to the same orport and/or produced >12 new connection attemps within 5 minutes to the orport. Those system do re-appear quickly if the denylist is flushed. Within one hour over 500K packets, mainly TCP connection attempts, are dropped. Furthermore the number of used sockets at the system is reduced from >35K to about 21K. Nevertheless both relays spew the warnings "Your computer is too slow" and "General overload" from time to time. I do assume that this is a layer 7 problem and therefore can't be fixed at layer 3. The filter is build up from iptables. Scripts for IPv4 and IPv6 can be found under [2] and [3] respectively. [1] https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/core/tor/-/issues/40636#note_2821683 [2] https://github.com/toralf/torutils/blob/main/ipv4-rules.sh [3] https://github.com/toralf/torutils/blob/main/ipv6-rules.sh -- Toralf

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Impact on running a tor relay on other internet services?
by Thoughts 28 Jul '22

28 Jul '22

Hi all - I've been running a TOR non-exit relay for several months now. Its rare, but I'm seeing what I believe is the occasional connection attack, with my relay complaining about the number of connections and suggesting I reduce capacity. Those are rare, and most of the time my server is running at about 20% CPU. During attacks, which seem unrelated to my Tor Upload/Download rate, CPU jumps to well over 100% (quad core, so 400% is max). I'd normally just ignore this, but it seems to be impacting other aspects of my network experience: Messenger Rooms will unexpected close, NetFlix gets "unable to stream this title", family complains about slow and dropped connections, etc. Just had it happen a few minutes ago with a Messenger Room and sure enough, CPU is at 130%, even though I'm only pumping about 15MB/Sec (37.5MB/S limit, 56.2 burst, 40.3 observered) over my gigabit ISP connection. Speedtest shows the performing within acceptable parameters. So contemplating what I can do, since this is bothersome. I've come up with a few alternatives, and curious about your thoughts: 1) Do some type of connection limiting at my PFSense Plus firewall. Perhaps limiting things to, say, 30 connections per IP address? Not even sure that is possible, but figure it might lighten the load on the TOR server. 2) Drop being a TOR non-exit relay and convert to a bridge. Not sure how long, if ever, it would take for my IP address, which is now public, to fade off of block lists... Not ideal, but at least as a bridge I'd still be servicing the environment. 3) Try connection limiting via iptables on the TOR host. Just seems like doing that at the firewall would be better. Thoughts? Kevin

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relay memory leak?
by Fran 26 Jul '22

26 Jul '22

Hey, new non-exit relay, Debian 11, tor 0.4.7.8-1~d11.bullseye+1, ~ 1 week old (-> no guard) KVM VM with atm 4 cores, host passthrough AMD EPYC (-> AES HW accel.). As can be seen at the attached screenshots memory consumption is irritating as well as the quite high CPU load. All was fine when it had ~100 Mbit/s but then onion skins exploded (110 per second -> up to 4k per second) as well as CPU and memory. Tor complains: > 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. And from time to time memory killer takes action torrc is pretty basic: Nickname 123 ContactInfo 123 RunAsDaemon 1 Log notice syslog RelayBandwidthRate 2X MBytes RelayBandwidthBurst 2X MBytes SocksPort 0 ControlSocket 0 CookieAuthentication 0 AvoidDiskWrites 1 Address xxxx OutboundBindAddress yyyy ORPort xxxx:yyy Address [zzzz] OutboundBindAddress [zzz] ORPort [zzz]:xxx MetricsPort hhhh:sss MetricsPortPolicy accept fffffff DirPort yy Sandbox 1 NoExec 1 CellStatistics 1 ExtraInfoStatistics 1 ConnDirectionStatistics 1 EntryStatistics 1 ExitPortStatistics 1 HiddenServiceStatistics 1 Ideas/suggestions (apart from limiting BW) to fix this? Thanks fran

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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 21 Jul '22

21 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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