Hello,
I successfully ran an obfs4 bridge about a year ago that saw moderate traffic. After a few months, the traffic died off until I was consistently seeing 0 clients. I wiped the keys, got a new IP address, and started a new bridge. The 2nd bridge saw 0 clients, over several months. I finally wiped it again and started a 3rd bridge. Same thing, 0 clients for several months. My 4th bridge, which I took down last night, was up for just shy of 3 months with 0 clients. Before I took it down, I tested using https://bridges.torproject.org/scan/ and confirmed the ports were reachable. While I was not able to test the previous iterations, I setup the port forwarding for each of them for both the OR Port and the Ext OR Port that it randomly assigned. I won't be able to grab a new IP address this time, but I'm starting the bridge up again with new ID keys and new ports. Is it normal for bridges to see no traffic, and if they're not seeing any, should I keep them online?
On Wed, Jul 03, 2019 at 02:38:03PM +0000, nottryingtobelame@protonmail.com wrote:
Is it normal for bridges to see no traffic, and if they're not seeing any, should I keep them online?
A bit of background: When you set up a bridge, by default it reports itself to BridgeDB, our system for bridge distribution. Each bridge falls in one of four BridgeDB "buckets": HTTPS, email, Moat, and unallocated. The unallocated bucket is the smallest of all four, and we use it for manual distribution, meaning that we occasionally take these bridges and hand them out to activists. This doesn't happen often which is why the unallocated bridges see the least use among all of BridgeDB's bridges. This is not ideal but it's the way things currently work.
There's a chance that your bridge ended up in the unallocated bucket but it's unlikely that it did so four times in a row. Since Tor version 0.3.2.3, you can express what bucket you want your bridge to be in, by setting the BridgeDistribution option.
All that said, please feel free to send me your bridge info off-list. I'll test it for you and check what bucket BridgeDB put it into, so you'll see actual users this time.
Cheers, Philipp
tor-relays@lists.torproject.org
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nottryingtobelame＠protonmail.com -
Philipp Winter