nusenu wrote:
As some of you might have noticed the tor network recently lost a noticeable number of relays and bridges as seen in the metrics.tpo relay graphs (0.7% cw fraction).
https://metrics.torproject.org/networksize.html https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DwGAESoXgAEoB6L.jpg
this occurred when these relays upgraded from tor 0.3.3.10 to 0.3.4.9 (package maintainer update)
All these relays were behind NAT devices and they relied on a tor feature that got removed between these two versions:
o Removed features: - The PortForwarding and PortForwardingHelper features have been removed. [...]https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/25409
The portforwarding worked only in about 5% of cases so only 350 of the over 6000 relays actually became reachable.
Since I still believe these relays are not run by humans I hope they remain unreachable behind their NAT routers.
Agreed, a very good and indicated removal -- those features where quite fragile and looked to users like they working as they should, where actually they worked in a very little percent.
Any relay properly run by a human, even behind NAT, can still be easily configured with the proper port forwarding. For some time now Tor is very explicit in such situations, it checks the discovered address vs the address in torrc/descriptor and indicates if there is a mismatch, so the user knows exactly what and where to fix.