[tor-relays] Help with FreeBSD relays

[Scott Bennett]

Fabian Keil <freebsd-listen at fabiankeil.de> wrote:

> xplato <xplato at protonmail.com> wrote on 2021-03-30:
>
> > 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.
>
> What do you mean by "they" and "shutting down"?

     It exits on signal 6.  See the tail end of the log excerpt I included
in my posting about 0.4.6.1-alpha being very noisy.  N.B. 0.4.5.7 also has
the same bug.
     I have browsed a bit in the consensus documents, looking for relays
running those versions of tor.  What I found was that the ones running those
versions on LINUX systems often have much longer uptimes, but I didn't find
any FreeBSD systems running them with uptimes much over one day, which is
consistent with them failing in short order on FreeBSD systems.  I did not
look for those versions on the other BSDs, but such systems are generally
much rarer than those on FreeBSD, except perhaps for MacOS.
>
> Seeing the torrc and /etc/sysctl.conf indeed could be useful.

     Possibly, but probably not.  Take a look at the crash messages that
tor usually writes to its notice-level log, which look like they have
something to do with authority code, but we, of course, do not run authority
relays.  I think I did have one crash that did not write that batch of
messages to syslog, but usually it does.
>
> Please also check the system and tor logs to see if there are
> any relevant log messages.

     I posted such in my previous two postings.
>
> If you don't already, you may want to start monitoring tor's
> and the system's resource usage.
>
     xplato's relay may differ from mine, but mine isn't using much these
days because the authorities have a) stopped giving mine an HSDir flag for
the last two months or so after giving it seemingly randomly for months
before that, and b) been giving or withholding a Fast flag seemingly also
at random.  This is on a relay that often runs at 300 KB/s to 400+ KB/s, both
in and out.  The whole mess makes me wonder whether it's worth my bothering
to maintain and run a relay anymore.
     Can you tell us why the consensus documents on Sunday showed *all*
authorities with Bandwidth=20 Unmeasured=1 for some hours?  What caused such
an alarming situation?

					Scott