[tor-relays] bridge offline

[Roger Dingledine]

On Thu, Dec 26, 2019 at 07:08:31PM +0000, Anonforpeace wrote:
> I had a power outage recently and I've restarted my bridge i.e. restarted the daemon and tor, and when I check the Relay Search section of Tor Metrics, it's taking a long time for my bridge to show as online again.  Also, not sure if this matters, but I am running Linux Mint, and recently upgraded to the latest version, 19.3.  Any ideas?

The way to help us diagnose better would be to provide the Relay
Search URL for your bridge. That is, you can look up your bridge by its
"hashed fingerprint", and people can look at that page, with anonymized
information about it, without learning anything that would help us find
out where the bridge is.

Also, does "taking a long time" means that it eventually returns? Or it
is still listed as offline?

The first step would be to look at the logs, and see if it thinks it's
reachable and it's publishing its server descriptor. Who knows, maybe your
Mint upgrade added a firewall that is blocking all incoming connections.

The next step would be to put together your bridge address, and configure
a Tor Browser to use it, and see if it works. If it's a "vanilla"
bridge then your bridge line is just ip address and port. If it's an
obfs4 bridge, then
https://community.torproject.org/relay/setup/bridge/post-install/
could be helpful.

Good luck!
--Roger