Is there any way to participate usefully with a daily changing IP?

Hello,

some time ago, i used to have a relay running on a Raspberry 1 for a while. It actually worked fine, just wasn’t very fast. After it died, I didn’t have a relay for 2-3 years and now wanted to reactivate it on a new Raspberry.

Said,Done.

But I can’t really get any traffic. First I tried it as a relay: The first few days it worked. I had a consensus weight of a few hundred and several gigabytes of traffic a day (bandwith limit was 1MB/s.). After about 10 days the consensus weight got worse and worse. I thought maybe the abrupt daily reconnect, that my provider requires, is the problem. So I installed a cronjob that stops tor a minute before the reconnect and then start it again. But this did not bring any improvement.

So I gave it up and set up a bridge with obfs4 instead. Unfortunately it is the same. For 4 days I had a little traffic (As usual for a new relay.) then it suddenly became less. Since 10.01.23 I have now seen no client at all.

Here is a typical log:

Jan 23 00:00:21.000 [notice] Tor 0.4.7.13 opening new log file.
Jan 23 04:59:01.000 [notice] Interrupt: we have stopped accepting new connections, and will shut down in 30 seconds. Interrupt again to exit now.
Jan 23 04:59:01.000 [notice] Delaying directory fetches: We are hibernating or shutting down.
Jan 23 04:59:31.000 [notice] Clean shutdown finished. Exiting.
Jan 23 05:01:02.000 [notice] Tor 0.4.7.13 opening log file.
Jan 23 05:01:02.093 [notice] We compiled with OpenSSL 1010106f: OpenSSL 1.1.1f  31 Mar 2020 and we are running with OpenSSL 1010106f: 1.1.1f. These two versions should be binary compatible.
Jan 23 05:01:02.109 [notice] Tor 0.4.7.13 running on Linux with Libevent 2.1.11-stable, OpenSSL 1.1.1f, Zlib 1.2.11, Liblzma 5.2.4, Libzstd 1.4.4 and Glibc 2.31 as libc.
Jan 23 05:01:02.109 [notice] Tor can't help you if you use it wrong! Learn how to be safe at https://support.torproject.org/faq/staying-anonymous/
Jan 23 05:01:02.109 [notice] Read configuration file "/usr/share/tor/tor-service-defaults-torrc".
Jan 23 05:01:02.109 [notice] Read configuration file "/etc/tor/torrc".
Jan 23 05:01:02.120 [warn] Listing a family for a bridge relay is not supported: it can reveal bridge fingerprints to censors. You should also make sure you aren't listing this bridge's fingerprint in any other MyFamily.
Jan 23 05:01:02.129 [notice] You configured a non-loopback address '192.168.0.2:9050' for SocksPort. This allows everybody on your local network to use your machine as a proxy. Make sure this is what you wanted.
Jan 23 05:01:02.130 [notice] Opening Socks listener on 192.168.0.2:9050
Jan 23 05:01:02.130 [notice] Opened Socks listener connection (ready) on 192.168.0.2:9050
Jan 23 05:01:02.130 [notice] Opening Control listener on 127.0.0.1:9051
Jan 23 05:01:02.130 [notice] Opened Control listener connection (ready) on 127.0.0.1:9051
Jan 23 05:01:02.130 [notice] Opening OR listener on 192.168.0.13:9090
Jan 23 05:01:02.130 [notice] Opened OR listener connection (ready) on 192.168.0.13:9090
Jan 23 05:01:02.130 [notice] Opening Extended OR listener on 127.0.0.1:0
Jan 23 05:01:02.130 [notice] Extended OR listener listening on port 39593.
Jan 23 05:01:02.131 [notice] Opened Extended OR listener connection (ready) on 127.0.0.1:39593
Jan 23 05:01:04.000 [notice] Parsing GEOIP IPv4 file /usr/share/tor/geoip.
Jan 23 05:01:05.000 [notice] Parsing GEOIP IPv6 file /usr/share/tor/geoip6.
Jan 23 05:01:06.000 [notice] Configured to measure statistics. Look for the *-stats files that will first be written to the data directory in 24 hours from now.
Jan 23 05:01:06.000 [notice] Your Tor server's identity key  fingerprint is 'XXXXXXX
Jan 23 05:01:06.000 [notice] Your Tor bridge's hashed identity key  fingerprint is 'XXXXXXX
Jan 23 05:01:06.000 [notice] Your Tor server's identity key ed25519 fingerprint is 'XXXXXXX'
Jan 23 05:01:06.000 [notice] You can check the status of your bridge relay at XXXXXX
Jan 23 05:01:06.000 [notice] Bootstrapped 0% (starting): Starting
Jan 23 05:01:10.000 [notice] Starting with guard context "default"
Jan 23 05:02:04.000 [notice] Signaled readiness to systemd
Jan 23 05:02:04.000 [notice] Registered server transport 'obfs4' at '192.168.0.13:1677'
Jan 23 05:02:06.000 [notice] Bootstrapped 5% (conn): Connecting to a relay
Jan 23 05:02:06.000 [notice] Opening Control listener on /run/tor/control
Jan 23 05:02:06.000 [notice] Opened Control listener connection (ready) on /run/tor/control
Jan 23 05:02:06.000 [notice] Unable to find IPv4 address for ORPort 445. You might want to specify IPv6Only to it or set an explicit address or set Address.
Jan 23 05:02:06.000 [notice] Bootstrapped 10% (conn_done): Connected to a relay
Jan 23 05:02:06.000 [notice] Bootstrapped 14% (handshake): Handshaking with a relay
Jan 23 05:02:06.000 [notice] Bootstrapped 15% (handshake_done): Handshake with a relay done
Jan 23 05:02:06.000 [notice] Bootstrapped 75% (enough_dirinfo): Loaded enough directory info to build circuits
Jan 23 05:02:06.000 [notice] Bootstrapped 90% (ap_handshake_done): Handshake finished with a relay to build circuits
Jan 23 05:02:06.000 [notice] Bootstrapped 95% (circuit_create): Establishing a Tor circuit
Jan 23 05:02:06.000 [notice] External address seen and suggested by a directory authority: 79.251.33.228
Jan 23 05:02:11.000 [notice] Bootstrapped 100% (done): Done
Jan 23 05:03:05.000 [notice] Now checking whether IPv4 ORPort XXXXXX:445 is reachable... (this may take up to 20 minutes -- look for log messages indicating success)
Jan 23 05:03:14.000 [notice] Self-testing indicates your ORPort XXXXXX:445 is reachable from the outside. Excellent. Publishing server descriptor.
Jan 23 05:05:10.000 [notice] Performing bandwidth self-test...done.
Jan 23 11:02:05.000 [notice] Heartbeat: Tor's uptime is 6:00 hours, with 0 circuits open. I've sent 2.73 MB and received 6.17 MB. I've received 219 connections on IPv4 and 0 on IPv6. I've made 26 connections with IPv4 and 0 with IPv6.
Jan 23 11:02:05.000 [notice] While bootstrapping, fetched this many bytes: 976 (microdescriptor fetch)
Jan 23 11:02:05.000 [notice] While not bootstrapping, fetched this many bytes: 3486400 (server descriptor fetch); 353 (server descriptor upload); 346543 (consensus network-status fetch); 18047 (microdescriptor fetch)
Jan 23 11:02:05.000 [notice] Heartbeat: Since last heartbeat message, I have seen 0 unique clients.

FYI: I have curtently a so “DSL 50.000” from “1&1” in Germany. Uploade is about 10Mbit/s, but an upgrade to 10Mbit/s is already ordered. Unfortunally the daily reconect will stay.

By the way: Is there anything against publishing the fingerprints or IP-Adresses here?

Best Wishes
Benjamin

You may try standalone Snowflake proxy instead of Tor node.
Or several proxies because of some limitations.

1 Like

+1 to snowflake. It’s quite useful and relays a lot of traffic if you have unrestricted NAT. Reboots and changing IP addresses have no adverse effect on its usefulness either.

By the way: Is there anything against publishing the fingerprints or IP-Adresses here?

If it’s a bridge don’t post the IP. If it’s a relay, the IP is already public.

Apart from the fact that I have no idea what an unrestricted NAT is supposed to be (I can easily forward any port on my firewall, I just need to know it…), it seems to me that the setup of snowflake, compared to a relay-which I can simply install from the repo of my distro, is rather complicated. And if I understand it correctly, I also have to take care of updates myself.

My current contract with my ISP runs for another 11 months. Then the problem with the changing IP is history.

It is possible to specify which UDP ports standalone snowflake proxy should use with -ephemeral-ports-range parameter.

In easiest case (restricted NAT), all that needs to be done is just executing proxy binary.
If you don’t have binary, things become slightly more complicated, but it’s just two more steps: git clone and go build: