[tor-relays] Tor bridge on Amazon not doing much

[Karsten Loesing]

On 8/2/13 4:37 AM, Andrew Lewman wrote:
> On Thu, 1 Aug 2013 14:11:38 -0700
> "Shawn A. Miller" <salexandermiller at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
>> I've been running a Tor bridge on the Amazon EC2 cloud computing
>> platform (per instructions at https://cloud.torproject.org/) since
>> July 27, and while the bridge is up and running according to the logs,
>> there doesn't seem to be much traffic running through it, i.e., latest
>> logs indicate Tor uptime is 2 days 12 hours with 2 circuits open; 6.6
>> MB sent and 45.75 MB received. Have I somehow managed to misconfigure
>> the bridge or is this normal?
> 
> First, thanks for running a bridge.  Second, this is normal. The
> determining factor of how much traffic you receive as a bridge is
> simply which bucket your bridge is placed in the BridgeDB. There are
> multiple buckets, some served via HTTPS, SMTPS, XMPP, and reserve
> buckets of bridges handed out by hand to trusted activists, or simply
> kept in reserve in case of emergency.
> 
> There's no way a bridge operator knows which bucket you're in.

Actually, there is (finally) a way to find out:

http://globe.rndm.de

Search for bridge nickname or fingerprint and look for the bridge's pool
assignment information.  (Note that this information may not be entirely
correct until we resolve #9264.)


However, a bridge's usefulness isn't determined by the number of bytes
it pushes.  We're currently working on resuming to hand out bridges in
the reserved bucket to activists.  So it's a good thing to have bridges
in the reserved pool which do not push much traffic yet.

Best,
Karsten