[tor-relays] Tor Metrics 'Running' flag is back for bridges who don't publish the OrPort

[Roger Dingledine]

On Sun, Jun 23, 2024 at 09:28:23PM +0200, lists at for-privacy.net wrote:
> A few months ago there was a recommendation to not exposing OrPort for 
> bridges.
> This had the unpleasant effect that all bridges were 'red' on Tor Metrics, 
> even though they were running perfectly fine.
> I noticed yesterday after the meeting that everything is 'green' again.
> https://metrics.torproject.org/rs.html#search/ForPrivacyNET
> 
> Thank you, I believe these 6 people did that:
> https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/network-health/team/-/issues/318

Right -- I think we are still in the process of fixing that issue. The
current situation as I understand it is that bridgestrap measures whether
your obfs4 port is reachable, and it uploads these results to the metrics
sites, and the metrics sites use them if available instead of looking
at Running.

But currently the "uploads to metrics" step happens once a day, while
bridgestrap produces results way more frequently than that.

And in the past there were surprises where the metrics side would say
something like "I'll call you running if bridgestrap said you were
reachable within the past three hours" -- which is a great design if
you are getting the bridgestrap results rapidly, but not great if you
get them once a day.

So, I'm glad to see that your relay was green again for a bit, but I
fear a bit more work remains until we get there *consistently*. :)

--Roger