- tor-relays - lists.torproject.org

Re: Tor Node infected with ransomware
by skankhunt42 03 Feb '26

03 Feb '26

Hi, Thank you for the replies. At the time of writing I was in total panic mode and rotated all my keys. Only after that I saw all these posts from users across different hosters facing the same issue. It was a good practice to just re-evaluate my OPSEC, though. I opened a support ticket with my hoster (HostSlick) and got a reply about 12 hours later. I didn't want to re-deploy until they gave confirmation they are clean again. Luckily, with the awesome relayor playbook I recovered the relay, I just lost the Guard flags, but I think thats fine for now, they'll come back :) However, I decided to turn my back on that hoster and cancelled my VPS, will be up for a few more months. We already had a few disagreements when the problem with spoofed IP abuse reports arose last year. My relay was suspended (without any notice) at the time for multiple days and it took some time to explain to the hoster that the packets did not came from me. PS: Thanks Marco, I will look into a centralized solution for collecting logs, just to make any future incidents easier to understand. Best, skankhunt42

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upcoming CIISS update
by nusenu 01 Feb '26

01 Feb '26

Hi, I'm working on a new contactinfo information sharing specification version. Current version (2): https://nusenu.github.io/ContactInfo-Information-Sharing-Specification/ Some likely changes will be: * add happy family proof https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/core/torspec/-/merge_requests/407/diffs * add signal username field https://support.signal.org/hc/en-us/articles/6712070553754-Phone-Number-Pri… * maybe add keyoxide field as suggested by boldsuck: https://github.com/nusenu/ContactInfo-Information-Sharing-Specification/iss… Feel free to send me your suggestions and opinions before 2025-06-30 by creating github issues or by replying to this thread. kind regards, nusenu -- https://nusenu.github.io

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Looking to interview Tor relay operators (online or at FOSDEM)
by Jules Dejaeghere 28 Jan '26

28 Jan '26

Hello, I am a researcher at the University of Namur (Belgium), and some of our research focuses on Tor. Recently, we started to investigate how Tor relay operators install and keep their relays up to date. This research was motivated by the (somewhat recent) policy of the Tor Project to exclude outdated relays from the network. As part of this research, we would like to interview relay operators to understand how they install and keep Tor up to date and what they think of the Tor Project policy. If you run, or used to run, Tor relay(s) and are willing to dedicate ~30 minutes of your time, let us know! Your participation will inform our current research about how Tor relay operators manage their relay(s). It will also provide community feedback to the Tor Project about their policy once our results are published. Interviews can be done either online (during the week of 2-6 February 2026, via Framatalk https://framatalk.org/abc/en/) or in person during FOSDEM in Brussels (31 January & 1 February 2026, https://fosdem.org/2026) To participate: - Contact me via email (jules.dejaeghere(a)unamur.be, PGP 0xEB4CC38446E3F82F) or Signal (@julesd.01) - Specify how you want to participate (online via Framatalk, or in person at FOSDEM) and what time slots work for you In practice: - The interview will be audio recorded for analysis by the research team - You can stop the interview at any time, and your answers will be deleted - The interview can be held either in English or in French You'll find attached the full consent form we will ask participants to sign, which describes how the data collected will be processed. If you have any additional questions, you can contact me. Regards, Jules Dejaeghere -- *Jules DEJAEGHERE* PhD Student · Researcher Computer Science Faculty jules.dejaeghere(a)unamur.be https://directory.unamur.be/staff/jdejaegh Université de Namur ASBL Rue de Bruxelles 61 - 5000 Namur Belgium Let’s respect the environment together. *Only print this message if necessary!*

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Upcoming Stabilization of Tor 0.4.9.x
by Alexander Hansen Færøy 28 Jan '26

28 Jan '26

Hello Tor Relay Operators! The Network Team, particularly David Goulet, is preparing to mark the Tor 0.4.9.x series stable. It will likely happen in the next few weeks, assuming that we don't run into trouble with the the 0.4.9.4-rc release that comes out this week (along with a probably-final update to 0.4.8). We hope you folks will update quickly, and provide the feedback we need, as you always do. Once Tor 0.4.9.x is released as stable, and is available in your package management system, we urge the relay operator community to begin this transition, particularly by adopting the Happy Family system included in this release. For more information, please check out the documentation[2]. At first, we will need you to co-maintain both the existing `MyFamily` system and Happy Families in parallel. If the network upgrade goes quickly, we hope to deprecate the `MyFamily` system sooner rather than later. This period, when both family systems coexist, will be painful, particularly for our Apple iOS users, due to the memory limitations of their Network Extension API. Once we can get rid of the `MyFamily` system, we expect our directory traffic and memory utilization to drop, which will hopefully make Tor more usable for these users and other users on lower-memory systems. In addition to the memory and traffic issues, we also want to acknowledge the pain points raised by the large operators, who currently need to partition their `MyFamily` settings into multiple logical subsets to avoid exceeding the max descriptor sizes we have in place to mitigate DoS. To use Happy Families, operators using `ansible-relayor`[1] should already have Happy Family key management support in the upstream project's GitHub repository. For everybody else, please have a look at the documentation[2] for more information on configuring Happy Families for your relays. Feel free to reach out here for assistance. Relay operators running a single relay where they currently don't set the `MyFamily` setting won't have to worry about Happy Families at all. Later this year, the Network Team + Network Health Team will have a blog post out on the current status of the Arti Relay project and how we foresee the remaining lifetime of C Tor. Happy Families was a bit of a special feature, as there was an urgent need for it, but it also lets us ignore the `MyFamily` system when building Arti Relay. Thanks! And I hope to see some of you at the Relay Operator Meetup[3] at FOSDEM in the upcoming weekend! Cheers, Alex [1]: https://github.com/nusenu/ansible-relayor [2]: https://community.torproject.org/relay/setup/post-install/family-ids/ [3]: https://fosdem.org/2026/schedule/event/DRMMAB-tor_relay_operator_meetup/ -- Alexander Hansen Færøy

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Turkmenistan Censorship
by Dan 27 Jan '26

27 Jan '26

Hello, I have been emailing with a user of my bridge who is located in Turkmenistan. They contacted me to say that their ISP has blocked my bridge(s) and to request I rotate either the domain name, IP address, or both. Has anyone else found a solution seems to work in this scenario? I'm happy to request a new public IP from my VPS provider but I'd like to avoid purchasing new domain names every few months. Maybe the best option is to buy a cheap domain and setup a "private" bridge that isn't distributed except manually? This bridge is using Webtunnel which the user says is usually harder for their ISP to detect. Should I switch to Lyrebird? Thanks

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Exit-Relay got no flags anymore - appears offline
by cembranutboys 22 Jan '26

22 Jan '26

Dear Tor team, My exit node has not had any flags for a few days. When I start the Tor service, the self-check says it can successfully reach my ORPort via IPv4 and IPv6. I was able to reach all authority servers via traceroute. I don't have a firewall active. I have restarted the Tor service several times, but unfortunately I am still not getting any flags. The node had been running successfully for over 220 days, which is why I don't quite understand the problems now. Fingerprint: F5EFEC7C4C4E4F48393D8EBA8CE18A4D1D3B2F67 Can you please help me? Thank you in advance. CembraNut~

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name resolution with libc
by Marco Moock 21 Jan '26

21 Jan '26

Hello! I operate an exit relay on FreeBSD. I changed the values in resolv.conf (that file lists the actual nameservers, not a local resolver), but tor DNS traffic was still sent to the old servers for days until I restarted tor. How is that handled in tor? -- Gruß Marco Send unsolicited bulk mail to 1768731494muell(a)stinkedores.dorfdsl.de

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Re: name resolution with libc
by Marco Moock 19 Jan '26

19 Jan '26

On 19.01.2026 01:52 D.O. Bronk wrote: > I just tried it out and funny thing, tor also didn't use the new > resolvers. So is my assumption right, that it doesn't use the libc functions, as in that case, the OS should handle that?

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Re: name resolution with libc
by Marco Moock 18 Jan '26

18 Jan '26

Am 18.01.2026 um 14:19:28 Uhr schrieb D.O. Bronk: > One of my exits is on FreeBSD too, I didn't know this yet, so good to > know. But normally a 'reload' instead of a 'restart' will suffice. > This way your tor relay doesn't lose it's uptime etcetera. > > If I'm not mistaken, this should also be done after sysctl fine > tuning. Is that anywhere documented? -- Gruß Marco Send unsolicited bulk mail to 1768742368muell(a)cartoonies.org

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Tor guard relay memory: what actually reduces RSS on Ubuntu 24.04
by Tor at 1AEO 17 Jan '26

17 Jan '26

Hello, We ran experiments over 10 days on ~100 Tor guard relays (Tor 0.4.8.x) on Ubuntu 24.04 to determine which memory optimizations materially affect long-term, steady-state RSS under sustained load. Results: allocator choice dominates steady-state RSS outcomes. Using mimalloc 2.x and jemalloc 5.x produced large, sustained reductions in resident memory, on the order of 70–80 percent, compared to the default glibc malloc; tcmalloc showed a smaller but measurable improvement. By contrast, the two commonly cited configuration parameters, MaxMemInQueues and MaxConsensusAgeForDiffs, showed little to no impact on steady-state RSS when adjusted in isolation. Operationally, these reductions allow higher relay density per host, with guard relay memory footprints decreasing from roughly 5–6 GB to approximately 1–2 GB per relay under sustained load. Attached are the summary chart and table. Full methodology, comparisons, and data are here, with links to scripts on GitHub to reproduce: https://www.1aeo.com/blog/tor-memory-optizations-what-actually-works.html Tor at 1AEO Approach Result Viable? mimalloc 2.1.2 1.16 GB (80% reduction) Yes jemalloc 5.3.0 1.59 GB (72% reduction) Yes tcmalloc 2.15 3.79 GB (33% reduction) Partial mimalloc 3.0.1 4.39 GB (23% reduction) Partial DirCache 0 0.29 GB (94% reduction) No (loses Guard) MaxMemInQueues ~5.0 GB (no change) No MaxConsensusAgeForDiffs ~5.7 GB (no change) No Periodic restarts 5.0–5.3 GB (minimal) Workaround only glibc 2.39 (control) 5.68 GB Baseline

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