My Relay regularly loses the guard flag. Sometimes it comes back alone, sometimes it comes back after I restart tor.

Support Relay Operator
1

Hi there !

I have been running a relay since a few month now, but sometimes my relay looses the guard flag and I don’t understand why.

I did a few changes that improved the situation, but every week or so, the relay looses again its guard status.

What I did so far:

  • remove the MaxMemInQueues parameter that was killing circuits
  • reduced the RelayBandwidthRate to 3MB (my server has 1GB RAM in total)
  • increased the RelayBandwidthBurst to 8MB

You can find the graph here: Relay Search

Shortly after the last loss of the guard flag, in the log appear “1 single hop clients refused”.

Close in time to the precedent loss of the guard flag, the INTRODUCE2 rejected value bumped from 1962 to 32388.

Could those be the reasons ?

I also regularly have this kind of warning:

Detected possible compression bomb with input size = 19828 and output size = 603465
Possible compression bomb; abandoning stream.

But time wise, they do not really match wise the loss of the guard.

Could you help me understand what induces the loss of the guard flag, and what can I do to avoid this ?

Thanks for your help !

2

zoozndeq via Tor Project Forum:

Hi there !

I have been running a relay since a few month now, but sometimes my relay looses the guard flag and I don’t understand why.

I did a few changes that improved the situation, but every week or so, the relay looses again its guard status.

What I did so far:

  • remove the MaxMemInQueues parameter that was killing circuits
  • reduced the RelayBandwidthRate to 3MB (my server has 1GB RAM in total)
  • increased the RelayBandwidthBurst to 8MB

You can find the graph here: Relay Search

Shortly after the last loss of the guard flag, in the log appear “1 single hop clients refused”.

Close in time to the precedent loss of the guard flag, the INTRODUCE2 rejected value bumped from 1962 to 32388.

Could those be the reasons ?

I also regularly have this kind of warning:

Detected possible compression bomb with input size = 19828 and output size = 603465
Possible compression bomb; abandoning stream.

But time wise, they do not really match wise the loss of the guard.

Could you help me understand what induces the loss of the guard flag, and what can I do to avoid this ?

Thanks for your help !

First of all you can easily check what the Directory Authorities think
about the Guard flag for your relay by entering the fingerprint at the
bottom of https://consensus-health.torproject.org/.

Then there are a number of requirements to be met to get the Guard flag.
They are specified at:

You see that you are currently missing the Stable flag, which is a
requirement, so that’s likely the reason you don’t have the Guard one.
You can read up on the Stable requirements in the link above as well.

To be sure what’s actually preventing the other Directory Authorities
from assigning you either flag you’d need to check their votes, which
you can find at