[tor-relays] Checking my Tor bridge and adventage of dynamic ip addresses

Moritz Bartl moritz at torservers.net
Fri Jul 19 10:05:07 UTC 2013


Hi,
On 19.07.2013 11:05, nobleeightfoldpath at lavabit.com wrote:
> The bridge runs a few days and I see: flags: no, and there is nearly
> zero traffic [...]

Bridges are handed out one by one to users from the pool of all bridges.
After a few days, only few users (if any) have been given your bridge
address. Then, every user is different: Some just try it out once, some
use it from time to time, and others are heavy users.

> How can I check my bridge is really working?

Unfortunately, there is no easy way to do so yet, apart from watching
Tor's logfile for error messages. You can look up your bridge in the
database, but it is not straightforward: For security reasons, the
database does not contain your bridge fingerprint, but a hash of your
fingerprint.
Example in python:

from binascii import a2b_hex
from hashlib import sha1
sha1(a2b_hex("<BRIDGEFP>")).hexdigest()

Take that result:

https://onionoo.torproject.org/details?search=<FP_HASH>

> Another question comes up. I use a cable connection to my ISP and they
> don't change my IP address, until plugging off my modem and wait an
> hour... I think if my bridge IP address is some day on some black lists,
> it could be an adventage if my IP address changes, right? If so, what
> changing time is fine, every day?

This is a fine question. It depends on who uses your bridge when, and in
what countries. I would not change address daily, but maybe every 2
weeks or every month.

-- 
Moritz Bartl
https://www.torservers.net/


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