On Wednesday, October 1st, 2025 at 08:46, Eritque arcus via tor-relays <tor-relays@lists.torproject.org> wrote:

Hi,

I don't know why but my bridge relay marked as down but I can connect to it with my Tor browser. Nyx can successfully detected my traffic and two others join after my traffic(but in other time it's just ~700B/s w/o connection). And every-time I restart the tor service, it will up for some hours. There is no error or warning in log.

More context: I setup my first relay on yesterday(>18hrs ago) on Ubuntu 24, Tor 0.4.8.18 following the guide; It's on KVM/QEMU VPS with some of my other services.

the status is right here: [<https://bridges.torproject.org/status?id=A69AD85C2E175BD0F753E1CCBE5D4BA371149685>](https://bridges.torproject.org/status?id=A69AD85C2E175BD0F753E1CCBE5D4BA371149685) and [<https://metrics.torproject.org/rs.html#details/A69AD85C2E175BD0F753E1CCBE5D4BA371149685>](https://metrics.torproject.org/rs.html#details/A69AD85C2E175BD0F753E1CCBE5D4BA371149685).

Do I need to allow some extra ports? right now I only accept the ORPort and block any others. Or it may relatives with my VPS ISP?

-- Best, Eritque Arcus

Hello everyone, I am actually experiencing the same problem, but with a OBFS4 bridge I've set up over a year ago on FreeBSD. The bridge keeps getting marked as down for a few hours and I am receiving Tor weather down mail each time, even though it is always online and reachable (ORPort + OBFS4). I've last tested with Tor on a smartphone and tcpdump, connecting with the bridge line worked both with the IPv4 and IPv6 address, both times I could see traffic from it's IPs. Also while typing this message, I am getting at least 10 - 20 Mbps, with spikes above 60 Mbps, all while the bridge is reportedly "offline". In my monitoring I also can't see any periods with no traffic at all. All firewall and NAT rules allow any traffic from the internet, matching the ORPort or OBFS4 port in torrc. Outgoing traffic is allowed everywhere to the internet. Status: https://bridges.torproject.org/status?id=159DAE6BC567CAE6F87281077518B6593C4... Relay search: https://metrics.torproject.org/rs.html#details/159DAE6BC567CAE6F87281077518B... Greetings,ZR

On Wed, Oct 01, 2025 at 10:47:56AM +0000, zwiebelrouter via tor-relays wrote:

I am actually experiencing the same problem, but with a OBFS4 bridge I've set up over a year ago on FreeBSD.

The bridge keeps getting marked as down for a few hours and I am receiving Tor weather down mail each time, even though it is always online and reachable (ORPort + OBFS4).

Hi! Thanks for running a bridge. I think your situation is different than the other person's issue. Your bridge gets a *lot* of use, presumably because many people have learned about it and use it as their bridge. So it makes sense that it continues to get use even when it's marked as down by rdsys and bridgestrap -- the users keep using it independent of whether it is marked down or given out to further users at that moment. One possible explanation is that it is overloaded to the point that it is inconsistent at receiving new incoming connections. That is, most of the time bridgestrap can successfully connect to it, but sometimes bridgestrap fails because you are out of some resource (file descriptors, socket accept queue, bandwidth, etc) at that moment. Another possible explanation is that some bug in the anti-censorship team toolchain (rdsys, bridgestrap, maybe the metrics side) is making it be marked down when it shouldn't be.

Status: https://bridges.torproject.org/status?id=159DAE6BC567CAE6F87281077518B6593C4...

Some days ago I tried this url and it said your bridge is working. But I just tried going there this moment and it says * obfs4 IPv4: dysfunctional Error: timed out waiting for bridge descriptor Last tested: 2025-10-04 18:15:42.513154413 +0000 UTC (2h47m17.286882518s ago) * obfs4 IPv6: dysfunctional Error: timed out waiting for bridge descriptor Last tested: 2025-10-04 18:15:42.513154413 +0000 UTC (2h47m17.286890098s ago) Yet I can still connect when I tried just now (albeit almost 3 hours after bridgestrap tried and failed so that doesn't say that much). So my guess is more toward 'inconsistently unreachable, perhaps because overloaded' rather than some toolchain bug. --Roger