[tor-relays] IPv6 Support or Uptime?

[William Kane]

Dear Josh,

thank you for running a Tor relay, but I have one concern:

If your IPv6 configuration randomly "stops working", and in order to
fix it, you have to restart your entire networking equipment, then
this is going to affect many clients - even if your Consensus Weight
equals the one of a pretty small relay, there's still going to be many
clients affected by such an operation - from what I have seen, even
very small relays ( averaging <= 100mbit/s ) can have up to 12000
circuits built through them, each one of them representing a TCP
connection somewhere. Especially the users running long, slow
downloads are at risk of losing any progress, since the Tor Browser
does not allow downloads to be resumed (note; this is just my
experience), and many web servers also don't seem support the feature.

I'd address the networking issue first before trying to run a Tor
relay, in order to have a strong foundation to build on - if you
continue running your Tor relay in it's current state, you risk not
getting certain flags (Stable, Guard, etc.) which will severely limit
the usability of your relay, and running a relay that does more harm
than good.

For anonymity and privacy reasons I don't want to give out detailed
IPv6 network stats for my own relay, but even after having it enabled
for a few months now, traffic is still mostly IPv4 - so, if you can
not fix the issues with IPv6, I'd say, at the moment, just disable the
support for it.

Best Regards,

William

2020-08-20 22:59 GMT, Josh Lawson <joshuawlawson at protonmail.ch>:
> I have IPv6 with my ISP, but there seems to be a bug in the firmware of my
> networking equipment that causes IPv6 to stop working periodically and I
> have to take my network down and bring it back up. If I do not do this, my
> relay stops functioning as I have torrc configured to use IPv6 and IPv4. So,
> my question is whether or not having a higher uptime is more important or
> having IPv6 support? My relay never goes down when on IPv4 only. I
> apparently cannot have both until the firmware bug is fixed. I appreciate
> it!