Dear Josh,
thank you for running a Tor relay, but I have one concern:
If your IPv6 configuration randomly "stops working", and in order to fix it, you have to restart your entire networking equipment, then this is going to affect many clients - even if your Consensus Weight equals the one of a pretty small relay, there's still going to be many clients affected by such an operation - from what I have seen, even very small relays ( averaging <= 100mbit/s ) can have up to 12000 circuits built through them, each one of them representing a TCP connection somewhere. Especially the users running long, slow downloads are at risk of losing any progress, since the Tor Browser does not allow downloads to be resumed (note; this is just my experience), and many web servers also don't seem support the feature.
I'd address the networking issue first before trying to run a Tor relay, in order to have a strong foundation to build on - if you continue running your Tor relay in it's current state, you risk not getting certain flags (Stable, Guard, etc.) which will severely limit the usability of your relay, and running a relay that does more harm than good.
For anonymity and privacy reasons I don't want to give out detailed IPv6 network stats for my own relay, but even after having it enabled for a few months now, traffic is still mostly IPv4 - so, if you can not fix the issues with IPv6, I'd say, at the moment, just disable the support for it.
Best Regards,
William
2020-08-20 22:59 GMT, Josh Lawson joshuawlawson@protonmail.ch:
I have IPv6 with my ISP, but there seems to be a bug in the firmware of my networking equipment that causes IPv6 to stop working periodically and I have to take my network down and bring it back up. If I do not do this, my relay stops functioning as I have torrc configured to use IPv6 and IPv4. So, my question is whether or not having a higher uptime is more important or having IPv6 support? My relay never goes down when on IPv4 only. I apparently cannot have both until the firmware bug is fixed. I appreciate it!