Thanks for running a bridge!

(But, please don't cross-post onto multiple Tor lists. Or for a different perspective, the tor-dev list is for developing Tor, not for reaching Tor's developers. :)

On Tue, Feb 10, 2015 at 09:03:10AM +0000, Sasikantha babu wrote:

Hello All,

I've been running a non-exit relay at home and a bridge on amazon cloud since dec-2014.  And today    I had noticed on atlas my bridge has got a guard flag and from the logs in the last 18 hours it had sent    4.73 GB and received 4.89 GB (finally I'm happy to see bandwidth being used on bridge). I've the    following questions    1. Is a bridge supposed to get a guard flag ?.   2. Is there a difference between a guard flag of a relay and a guard flag of a bridge?. Thanks

This is totally normal. The bridge directory authority shares a lot of code with the normal directory authorities -- it tracks uptime and, reachability, assigns flags, and so on.

In some cases these flags for bridges are still useful. For example, when the bridges.torproject.org service is giving out bridges, it has a mode where it tries to include at least one bridge with the Stable flag in its response set, to reduce situations where you get a pile of bridges but then they all go down soon after.

I don't think we use the Guard flag for anything right now for bridges. But hey, you can be happy knowing that your bridge is in the upper half of bridges by both capacity and stability.

Thanks! --Roger