Hi Niklas,
Way cool!
There is no golden rule on when to turn a relay into a bridge or vice versa. Does the relay have a dynamic IP? Do you lose connectivity regularly, for longer periods? From the graph it looks like a nice, stable relay that has just not been up long enough to attract enough usage, and the only thing it needs at the moment is patience. It can take a relay a couple of weeks to reach its full potential. You might like the "lifecycle of a Tor relay" blog post for some explanations [1].
If I were you, I would just wait a while longer. We cannot know for sure because there has been too little investigation into how exactly geographical diversity influences diversity. We do know that diversity is good for the anonymity properties of Tor, and that geographical location plays quite a role, both legally and technically. For more information, you might want to start with the excellent "Users get routed" paper. [2] It would make me very happy to see this relay around for longer, and not have it "disappear to become a random bridge" just yet.
Should you ever run into legal trouble in Cambodia because of this (I have no feeling how they feel about anonymity, now or in the years to come), remember that you can contact us for help. We can try to arrange lawyers, pay bribes, etc, whatever helps. ;-)
Once you max out your connection, please let me know also. We can then see whether it makes sense for us to pay for additional capacity.
If you think it is theoretically possible to run exits there, and you can find an ISP that is willing to do it, but don't want to take the risks, we can also discuss if it would be possible for Torservers.net to legally run it instead of you.
Thanks!
Moritz
[1] https://blog.torproject.org/blog/lifecycle-of-a-new-relay [2] http://freehaven.net/anonbib/#ccs2013-usersrouted
On 02/10/2015 02:03 PM, Niklas Femerstrand wrote:
Moin,
Our relay is online as of Jan 23 and recently I've been thinking about pivoting it into a bridge instead. The relay lives in Cambodia and may naturally be a bit off from the rest of the network (latency).
Consensus weight is steadily increasing despite various initial downtime incidents, which you can see in Atlas graphs. (We've had some network upgrades and during a separate event even had a monkey yanking the eth from the nic.)
Currently we advertise 435.66 KB/s and with our current ~9d 10h uptime we have downloaded 3.6 GB resp uploaded 3.7 GB. Theoretically our tubes fit 10 Mbps download and 30 Mbps upload.
The question is whether the relay is worth keeping with its current setup or if we can contribute more by re-configuring into a bridge. Unfortunately it is very risky for us to allow exit traffic, but we <3 any cipher packet.
Please advice! https://atlas.torproject.org/#details/94F806110B23E727AE8BAD74DD95B0EE0B7A8E...
Regards,
King Kong
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