[tor-relays] Thoughts and insight before bridge moving

[William Kane]

Hi,

Every bridge is useful, and a possible chance for a tor user to
circumvent censorship, you can't possibly know which bridges are
already blocked for a user, so every bridge in the network counts  -
looking at your graphs, on average 50 people are connected to it,
compared to other bridges, that's a lot of users - if you move your
bridge, make sure to keep / back up the private signing keys, the
bridge related data (it's a separate folder inside the DataDirectory)
and if possible, the IP address it's running under, if you lose either
of them, you will lose all your clients which trust and possibly rely
on you, the bridge operator, to continue operations.

More information on moving tor nodes can be found here:
https://2019.www.torproject.org/docs/faq.html.en#UpgradeOrMove

Regards,
William

2021-03-07 10:35 GMT, a tor op <atorop at protonmail.ch>:
> Hello
>
> I was thinking of perhaps asking and checking if the list has some comments
> on thoughts I have.
>
> I'm attaching a picture, hope that's not a problem, guess it's better than
> providing a URL to a file upload place (or maybe that's ok too?).
>
> I've been running a TOR bridge node for some years and need to rebuild/move
> it.
>
> For some time I wasn't sure how useful it was, whether or not it contributed
> in a useful way and I don't think it still has all the flags it could/should
> have?
>
> So, for you around here with an even deeper experience of the network,
> looking at the stats, are there any particular insights that can be drawn
> from there? Is it a useful bridge, stats that could or should look
> differently, anything else?
>
> BTW, there's a huge spike in connections on 9 Aug -20 (and there's been
> similar occasions earlier too) does that coincide with known attacks on the
> network or what?
>
> I guess, should I want to continue providing service, that it's useful or
> possibly preferred to move over the keys/config (?) to indicate same admin
> (and for users if there's no noticeable interruption the move won't even be
> noticed I suppose).
>
>
> TIA,
> a tor op
>
>