Hello fellow operators
I have one pretty large relay, MIGHTYWANG which is an IP4/6 guard, dedicated hardware running on a 1Gb line uncontended. It is usually one of the top 5 relays by consensus weight but on the morning of 14th October it lost Guard status on account of losing the stable flag.
I checked logs, connectivity and server health - nothing unusual, everything is generally pretty bullet proof in and around the relay and it had been running for well over a year without a reboot - just the very occasional Tor daemon restart following upgrades but no such activity prior to the 14th.
So next I checked the consensus and I see that around half of the directory authorities seem to be not assigning the stable flag. See attached screenshot showing current consensus.
The peering to each of those relays seems OK from what I can see (IP4 and IP6) so any idea what gives?
I've got a MIGHTYWANG sitting here twiddling it's thumbs because have the directory authorities don't want to use it. Bit of a waste.
I had similar things happen a few years ago with one of my old relays; again no obvious reason, just seemed to be the a random whim of the directory authorities.
I've noticed a couple of other long term relays are in a similar position - is this some time of attack, deliberate action or just Tor magic?
Wang
