[tor-relays] Is my relay broken? No stable, hsdir or guard flags

[Roger Dingledine]

On Fri, Jan 29, 2021 at 11:32:44AM +0100, raltullou at posteo.org wrote:
> - At the beginning of January the relay seems to have lost the guard flag
> - A week ago I checked and noticed that the relay had also lost the stable
> flag despite having an uptime of >2 months at that point
> - A week ago I rebooted the server but the situations hasn't changed - flags
> are still gone

Some of the directory authorities have restarted many times in the past
week, and each restart impacts their view of whether other relays are
stable. In theory it should impact all the views equally (it's like
there was a blip in the matrix but it was an equal blip for everybody),
but in practice, maybe the math doesn't make it actually equal.

> - metrics.torproject graphs show that the server has been transmitting data
> the entire time - so it doesn't seem like I missed some downtime

The graphs on relay-search are visualizing data that is self-reported by
the relay. So from the relay's perspective there was no downtime, but
that doesn't give us much hint about whether the directory authorities
found the relay consistently reachable.

Another hint I find useful is to look at the individual votes from
the directory authorities. One way to do that is to go to the bottom of
https://consensus-health.torproject.org/#relayinfo and put in your
nickname.

> - Serverlogs show no problems
> - Relay has been running continuously for almost 4 years and only gets
> rebooted for kernel/tor upgrades -> so uptime and MTBF should not be a
> problem
> 
> Is there a problem on my side?
> Is there anything I can do or check?

One part that I would look into more is the IPv6 connectivity. Maybe
that address is intermittent? If it is, then the relay would mostly
continue to work as normal (because clients mostly use IPv4), but the
subset of the dir auths that checks IPv6 reachability would consider
that instability to be a short downtime.

> It is a fallback relay - is it still useful as such?

It is still useful yes.

Thanks,
--Roger