[tor-relays] why the network lost 350 relays and some, bridges

[Argo2]

I was intrigued by the high number of consumer IP's that these relay are 
supposed to be running on while seemingly automated updating the relay 
version. The nickname made me look into Ubuntu Snaps as a possible tor 
distribution which led me to this snap: 
https://snapcraft.io/tor-middle-relay.

It was last updated the 9th of January and when you download the stable 
snap it is actually named 'snap269'. So the maintainer in this case is 
the snap maintainer, but not necessarily the relay(s) operator.  I have 
not looked into how these snaps actually work but it may be the case 
that they actually needed the PortForwaring functionality to get tor 
running inside a snap.

Given that information it could very well be the case that these relays 
are not running behind a NAT and not run by the same operator but 
actually by a group of different people.

> Date: Sat, 12 Jan 2019 08:07:00 +0000
> From: nusenu <nusenu-lists at riseup.net>
> 
>> this occurred when these relays upgraded from tor 0.3.3.10 to 0.3.4.9
>> (package maintainer update)
>>
>> All these relays were behind NAT devices and they relied on a tor
>> feature that got removed between these two versions:
>>
>>>    o Removed features:
>>>      - The PortForwarding and PortForwardingHelper features have been
>>>        removed. [...]https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/25409
> 
> I guess I somehow expected that: the maintainer patched tor 0.3.4.10 to added this
> feature again and here we go again with the flood of relays using that version of tor:
> 
> 79 relays from 2019-01-11:
> 
> |   Up |   Ext | JoinTime   | Nickname   | Version   | IP              | AS                                       | CC   |   ORp |   Dirp | OS    | Contact   |   eFamMembers | FP                                       |
> |------+-------+------------+------------+-----------+-----------------+------------------------------------------+------+-------+--------+-------+-----------+---------------+------------------------------------------|
> |    0 |     0 | 01:06:55   | snap269    | 0.3.4.10  | 117.104.229.222 | Instatelecom Limited                     | af   | 43453 |      0 | Linux | None      |             1 | CF52FF9F481C618E540D5DACB0C2875F1B7687B5 |
> |    0 |     0 | 01:27:25   | snap269    | 0.3.4.10  | 90.253.141.146  | Vodafone Limited                         | gb   | 46089 |      0 | Linux | None      |             1 | B483C5FE8A2888F8E02885D8488404DBBEFBCF3B |
> [SNIP]