On Wed, Sep 25, 2024 at 05:53:35PM +0700, Tor Relay Net Ops via tor-relays wrote:
I'm currently running a tor relay on a dynamic IP Address connection, usually my ISP gives me a new address every day or so-
Lately [for the past like week or so- /can't remember when it started happening/], I have to manually restart it when my WAN IP Address changes; to get the relay back online- (systemctl restart tor@default)
Is there a way to not manually restart tor (besides running a cron script to do so)
Tor 0.4.8.12 on Linux
Hm! It should work. Four thoughts:
(A) What do your logs say? It should be giving you lines like
log_notice(LD_CONFIG, "External address seen and suggested by a " "directory authority: %s", fmt_addr(addr));
(A') Actually, what exactly is going wrong? You say you have to restart, but, is your relay recognizing a new IP address and publishing even though it isn't reachable at that address yet, e.g. because of firewall rules? Or is it not even recognizing that the address has changed? Does it recover if you wait a while?
(B) We had some relay address detection bugs that got introduced in Tor 0.4.5 and never got resolved. So detection is definitely more fragile than it was in the 0.4.4 days. I think it mainly affects people running their relays inside containers or other weird situations. But also, maybe people just quietly stopped trying and left, who knows.
The starting point for investigating those is https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/core/tor/-/issues/40424
(C) The old-school way of handling this was to get a dyndns account and then set your torrc Address to point to your dyndns hostname. That is, you run a periodic tool that reaches out to the service and it makes sure to update the hostname it gives you to match your current address.
Apparently dyndns has turned from the great free service that it used to be into a mess of for-profit scamminess. But the nice people on irc point me to https://freedns.afraid.org/ as one option that's also been around forever and doesn't seem like it's gone scammy yet.
(D) If you investigate it more and you realize you have found a specific bug ("it should do this but it does that instead"), please do open a gitlab ticket, to help the next person: https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/core/tor/-/issues/
Thanks! --Roger