Why is my Tor bridge relay not getting any traffic? - tor-relays

26 Aug 2019


      Hello everybody!
I used to run a Tor bridge on Windows at home, where I have a 300/150 
Mbps ISP. This Windows has memory leak and crashes after some hours, ad 
I believe that was making my bridge never get traffic.
A few weeks ago I moved it to a Ubuntu server, also at home. I use 
uptimerobot.com to monitor if its port is reachable from outside and 
healthchecks.io to monitor if traffic entering from its local SOCKS port 
is reaching check.torproject.org. It's always up and reachable.
But nyx reports it's rarely getting any traffic, and its bandwidth never 
surpasses 1KB/s. Its log heartbeat reports very little download and 
upload and always claims to has seen 0 unique clients. But how come, if 
my healthchecks.io monitor's curl call uses it every few minutes?
metrics.torproject.org reports correct dates and uptime. Advertised 
Bandwidth is 58KB/s, way above what nyx reports. Flags are Fast, 
Running, V2Dir, Valid.
What might be wrong? Or is it normal for a Tor bridge relay be this 
idle? This is my torrc removing identifiable data.
|## Configuration file for a typical Tor user ## Last updated 9 October 
2013 for Tor 0.2.5.2-alpha. ## (may or may not work for much older or 
much newer versions of Tor.) ## A handle for your relay, so people don't 
have to refer to it by key. Nickname MyNick ContactInfo mycontact ## 
Entry policies to allow/deny SOCKS requests based on IP address. 
SocksPort 9031 #SocksPort ::9031 #SocksPort 0.0.0.0:80 #SOCKSPolicy 
accept 192.168.* ## Send all messages of level 'notice' or higher to 
/var/log/tor/notices.log Log notice file /var/log/tor/notices.log ## 
Send every possible message to /var/log/tor/debug.log #Log debug file 
/var/log/tor/debug.log ## Use the system log instead of Tor's logfiles 
#Log notice syslog ## Uncomment this to start the process in the 
background... or use RunAsDaemon 1 ## The directory for keeping all the 
keys/etc. By default, we store ## things in $HOME/.tor on Unix, and in 
Application Data\tor on Windows. DataDirectory /var/lib/tor ## The port 
on which Tor will listen for local connections from Tor ## controller 
applications, as documented in control-spec.txt. ControlPort 9051 ## If 
you enable the controlport, be sure to enable one of these ## 
authentication methods, to prevent attackers from accessing it. 
CookieAuthentication 1 ################ This section is just for relays 
##################### # ## See 
https://www.torproject.org/docs/tor-doc-relay for details. ## The IP 
address or full DNS name for incoming connections to your ## relay. 
Leave commented out and Tor will guess. Address hikari.mydomain.com ## 
Required: what port to advertise for incoming Tor connections. ORPort 80 
## Uncomment this to mirror directory information for others. Please do 
## if you have enough bandwidth. DirPort 9030 # what port to advertise 
for directory connections ServerTransportPlugin obfs3,obfs4 exec 
/usr/bin/obfs4proxy #ExtORPort 0.0.0.0:8000 ExtORPort 9041 ## Uncomment 
to return an arbitrary blob of html on your DirPort. Now you ## can 
explain what Tor is if anybody wonders why your IP address is ## 
contacting them. See contrib/tor-exit-notice.html in Tor's source ## 
distribution for a sample. #DirPortFrontPage 
/etc/tor/tor-exit-notice.html ExitPolicy reject *:* # don't run as an 
exit node BridgeRelay 1 # bridge PublishServerDescriptor 1 # published 
on bridge directory DB BridgeRecordUsageByCountry 1 # it's nice to see 
the country codes of users you are assisting #BandwidthRate 512000 
#RelayBandwidthBurst 512000 #RelayBandwidthRate 512000 CellStatistics 1 
PaddingStatistics 1 DirReqStatistics 1 EntryStatistics 1 
ExitPortStatistics 1 ConnDirectionStatistics 1 HiddenServiceStatistics 1 
ExtraInfoStatistics 1 #If non-zero, try to write to disk less frequently 
than we would otherwise. This is useful when running on flash memory or 
other media that support only a limited number of writes. (Default: 0) 
AvoidDiskWrites 0|