Moved bridge to new server, connections show zero?

Support Relay Operator
1

I’ve been running a bridge relay on Debian for a number of years no problem. I had to move it to a new server (Ubuntu 22.04) a couple of weeks ago. I did this by simply copying /etc/tor and /var/lib/tor over, but I’m seeing no clients reported.

My logs imply there are though? Can anyone tell me what’s up?

Oct 23 08:01:06 xxx.uk Tor[119434]: Heartbeat: Tor's uptime is 11 days 0:00 hours, with 10 circuits open. I've sent 593.98 MB and received 801.64 MB. I've received 812 connections on IP>
Oct 23 08:01:06 xxx.uk Tor[119434]: While bootstrapping, fetched this many bytes: 754 (microdescriptor fetch)
Oct 23 08:01:06 xxx.uk Tor[119434]: While not bootstrapping, fetched this many bytes: 308870236 (server descriptor fetch); 15853 (server descriptor upload); 16141491 (consensus network->
Oct 23 08:01:06 xxx.uk Tor[119434]: Heartbeat: Since last heartbeat message, I have seen 5 unique clients.
2

After moving the bridge is normal to loose all clients, as the ones that knew about the bridge will not be able to connect to it and new clients needs to find you. Your bridge is in the settings pool, where different bridges are distributed every day (to reduce the options censors have to discover them), so your bridge might take some days to be distributed and get clients connected to it. But please keep it up and running as it will be really useful once it gets distributed.

Thank you for running and maintaining the bridge.

3

Ah OK. Thanks - I was just a bit confused about what I was seeing in the logs and what’s shown on metrics.torproject.org but I’ll keep waiting :slight_smile: