[tor-relays] Low-bandwidth relay

[Matt Traudt]

On 9/4/19 06:21, John Williams wrote:
> I've been running tor on my openwrt-based home router (along the lines of 'anonabox'), and I configured it as a non-exit relay,  because I thought why not - every little helps, right? I set a very low bandwidth limit, but it was using most of the configured bandwidth, so I figured it was helping.
> 
> A few days ago I got an email saying my tor version was EOL, so I upgraded from version 0.3.2.10 to 0.4.1.5 (which required upgrading openwrt). Now tor is still working fine for me, but I don't see any network traffic when I'm not using it, so it is evidently not routing any third-party traffic any more. I don't see any errors in the log.

It doesn't seem like there's anything wrong with your relay[0].

It's slow, doesn't have much weight, and doesn't have the Guard flag.
All normal for a slow relay. It also is reachable from all the
authorities (go to [1] and paste your fingerprint in at the bottom).

I don't know how you're determining whether or not your relay is
handling traffic, but maybe something changed in Tor that makes your
tool fail to report the traffic Tor is handling (I think this is unlikely).

Perhaps you weren't paying close attention to how much your relay was
handling hour-by-hour before since everything was fine, but now since
you just upgraded you are hyper-aware of what you're relay is handling
and are perceiving an issue where there isn't one (I think this is more
likely).

Or somewhat similarly, since your relay is so small, it is hardly ever
chosen by people. Before you had your relay running for 10s or 100s of
days at a time nonstop (just a guess) so it had time to accumulate a
couple people using it nonstop constantly, causing it to consume all its
very limited bandwidth. But now it has only been online for 20 hours and
hasn't accumulated anyone significant. I also think this is more likely
than the first time.

Finally, perhaps the upgrade serendipitously or causally coincides with
a slower measurement from the bandwidth authorities. If this is the
case, there's nothing you can do. These things happen. The bandwidth
measurement system Tor uses is imperfect and confusing and prone to
unsatisfying-ly explainable behavior.

Hope that helps. Thanks for running a relay. To a some extent, a relay
existing is the majority of the contribution and the specific amount of
traffic it carries day-to-day is less important.

[0]:
https://metrics.torproject.org/rs.html#details/3DA54600E615E5AF841C03FB81D7321735562B5B
[1]: https://consensus-health.torproject.org/

-- 
Matt