[tor-relays] Odd activity on my rely

Roger Dingledine arma at mit.edu
Tue Jul 19 16:30:34 UTC 2011


On Tue, Jul 19, 2011 at 03:58:43PM +0000, George Gemelos wrote:
>I'm running an exit node, yreka

Thanks for running a fast exit relay!

> and have noticed as single IP address
>that has been connected for at least a day, probably longer, which is
>pushing anywhere from 3Mb to 9Mb but receives very little traffic back
>from my node, sub 500Kb.  My traffic to this machine is going out of 443
>(my ORPort) and being sent to port 50090 on the other machine.  I only
>allow exit traffic to ports 80 and 443.  So I do not think this is exit
>traffic.

Agreed.

>I have also checked on blutmagie and could not find the IP
>as a relay which would suggest that this is a TOR user and I am serving
>as an entry node.  I have never seen such speeds for a single user.

It's still possible that it's a Tor relay -- some relays send their
outbound traffic on a different IP address than the one they advertise
in their server descriptor. Generally it's within the same /16 though.

> The one sided nature of the traffic and its size have my interests
>peaked.  I just wanted to verify that this is not unusual and something
>that I should investigating.  I did not include the IP address of the
>machine because I was not sure it would be in the spirit of TOR to post
>such information.

Good idea.

>  Any feedback would be greatly appreciated.

If you want to play around with a new feature, you might upgrade to
0.2.2.30-rc and set the PerConnBWRate and PerConnBWBurst torrc options,
e.g. to 100KB and 5MB respectively. That should make the bandwidth you
provide more fair without hurting most users.

But it's still an open research question what values would be smart there,
and whether setting the values is actually helpful or harmful:
https://blog.torproject.org/blog/research-problem-adaptive-throttling-tor-clients-entry-guards
so the safest thing to do is just to ignore it.

--Roger



More information about the tor-relays mailing list