Hey all, I read this post on the forum from 13 days ago about the move away from BridgeDB and to rdsys, in the post it was announced that new bridges will no longer be assigned to moat and only existing bridges or people who manually specify it will have their bridge assigned to moat.
Due to this I decided to not touch my year-old obfs4 bridge that’s still assigned to moat but not getting a lot of traffic anymore, and set up a second one instead hoping it will be more helpful in the other distribution methods. I followed the official guide as usual and set up a simple bridge with the same working torrc config and networking setup I usually used and went to bed, but when I checked it the next day, it was up and running with the usual flags, but I was surprised to find on the relay search page that it was assigned to moat. As of the time of writing about 24 hours later it’s still assigned to moat.
Does anyone know if this is a bug or if the migration is not fully complete yet? From what I understood on the official post, I was under the impression that BridgeDB has already been fully deprecated, new bridges won’t be assigned to moat and existing moat bridges will stay that way for the foreseeable future until they collect enough metrics to decide what to do with them.
Was I mistaken or did I miss some recent news? I tested the bridge manually and confirmed it seems to be working as a bridge as normal. I’m running the latest 0.4.8.12 version from the official repo.
I don’t pay a lot of attention and usually just set it up and leave it alone, so I’m sorry if I missed some obvious news, I tried to do some searches but nothing useful has really come up.
Is your new bridge sharing the IP address from your previous one?
We assign bridges with the same IP (or the same fingerprint) to the same distributor. So if it shares the IP with a moat bridge it will be assigned to that distributor unless configured otherwise.
Thank you, that makes so much more sense, I have both bridges “proxied” through the same VPS to avoid my home IP being blocked when it eventually gets scraped somehow since it has happened before from just running a bridge, I guess I will proxy it through another VPS instead.
Will I have to wipe it and generate a new identity after I change the IP it’s running behind for it to be reassigned? Or do I just have to update torrc and networking then restart it?
If I shut down my original bridge and generate a new identity for the new bridge will I be able to “disassociate” the IP with the old distribution method?
Will I have to wipe it and generate a new identity after I change the IP it’s running behind for it to be reassigned? Or do I just have to update torrc and networking then restart it?
Yes, it will need a new identity, as if it has the same fingerprint it will be assigned to the same distributor.
If I shut down my original bridge and generate a new identity for the new bridge will I be able to “disassociate” the IP with the old distribution method?
No, as long as is the same IP it will be assigned to the same distributor.
Another option is to add a BridgeDistribution option in your torrc, rdsys will respect whatever distributor you set there. For example you could put settings there as is the one used most used.
Thank you for the answers, I’ll manually set it to “settings” for now. BTW do I have to close this thread somehow or is just marking the solution enough?
