[tor-relays] Help with FreeBSD relays

[Scott Bennett]

xplato <xplato at protonmail.com> wrote:

> I am a bit of a noob here so please bear with me. I ran a relay using Ubuntu with very few issues however I decide to add an additional relay and decided to use FreeBSD. They will only run for around 18 hours and then they shut down. I have adjust the torrc file every way I know how and increased the Max vnodes thinking this may have been my issue. I can post the sysrc and torrc if needed. Anyone that might help me figure this out I would be grateful otherwise I am going to reluctantly move them both back to Ubuntu.
>
     Thanks for attempting to run a relay in a diversifying environment.
Unfortunately, your timing has left you high and dry.  What is happening
is not your fault.  Both 0.4.5.7 and 0.4.6.1-alpha have a fatal bug.  I
don't know which version of tor introduced it because I have been running
0.4.5.2-alpha until a few days ago, when I "upgraded" to 0.4.6.1-alpha.
That crashed in under 24 hours twice, so I switched to the allegedly
"stable" version, 0.4.5.7 only to have it crash the same way in about 12
or 13 hours.  Also, 0.4.6.1-alpha was filling its notice-level log file
with many bug messages the whole time it was running.  I posted a message
on this list about it, including the last few hours of the log up through
the crash messages.  At the crash, the console log (also in /var/log/messages)
had a message like this.

Mar 27 18:29:26 hellas kernel: pid 17047 (tor), jid 0, uid 256: exited on signal 6

     After the second crash I made the switch mentioned above.  It has been
crashing ever since, and I am getting very tired of discovering that it has
been down for several hours.  There have been no responses to my earlier
posting, but your query is on the same topic, if a different Subject: line,
so I am replying.
     This sort of thing has not hit me in tor in many years, and I hope the
tor project developers will fix it ASAP.  My suggestion is that you hold
off a bit and try again once the bug has been squashed.  Alternatively, if
you a different BSD system (i.e., DragonflyBSD, NetBSD, or OpenBSD), running
your relay on that system would help diversify the systems running relays
as much as, or more than, running it on FreeBSD.  IOW, it depends on how
urgently you want to get a relay up and running vs. your level of patience
to wait for a bug fix.  Like I wrote above, this situation hardly ever
happens, so if you can be patient, it may be fixed within a few days.


                                  Scott Bennett, Comm. ASMELG, CFIAG
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