[tor-relays] Consensus frequently reports relay down, despite relay passing traffic

Hello.

One of my relays, forest19 (E21B4A2C2852298186C0EA7E2F900EF03AE38D69),
frequently appears offline in the consensus despite my uptime monitors
and bandwidth graphs showing uninterrupted activity. About once a day to
once every other day, I get a Tor Weather notice that my relay has been
offline for the last 4 hours.

The relay is able to ping all authorities but Sarge, and I am not seeing
abnormally high packet loss. How do I troubleshoot this?

Regards,
forest

···

_______________________________________________
tor-relays mailing list -- tor-relays@lists.torproject.org
To unsubscribe send an email to tor-relays-leave@lists.torproject.org

One really helpful tool is looking at the individual votes, to see if
there is a pattern of *which* dir auths can / can't reach you.

Go to the bottom of Consensus health
and put in forest19 and click load, and we see that at this moment, you
have five Running votes (from moria1, tor26, gabelmoo, dannenberg, and
maatuska), and that's a majority of nine so you are considered Running,
but it sure is close to not a majority.

I'm running a tcptraceroute from an IP address nearby moria1 and it works,
but from moria1's outbound IP address (128.31.0.39) my tcptraceroute
currently fails after 212.20.21.242 -- that is, it appears something in
Russia is filtering on moria1's IP address.

It looks from moria1's logs like I could reach you an hour ago (at
21:31:04 EST) but the tests after that (at 21:52:24, at 22:13:44, at
22:35:04 all EST) have failed. So I am all set to vote not Running for
you in the next vote, and maybe that will be enough to lose your Running
flag again.

Your IPv6 address is reachable the whole time.

Since this is a Russian router we are talking about, one possibility is
that they are censoring the public Tor relay IP addresses, but doing it
only sometimes, or on some routes (which could look like sometimes as
the routes change).

--Roger

···

On Fri, Dec 26, 2025 at 01:12:30AM -0000, forest-relay-contact--- via tor-relays wrote:

Hello.

One of my relays, forest19 (E21B4A2C2852298186C0EA7E2F900EF03AE38D69),
frequently appears offline in the consensus despite my uptime monitors
and bandwidth graphs showing uninterrupted activity. About once a day to
once every other day, I get a Tor Weather notice that my relay has been
offline for the last 4 hours.

The relay is able to ping all authorities but Sarge, and I am not seeing
abnormally high packet loss. How do I troubleshoot this?

_______________________________________________
tor-relays mailing list -- tor-relays@lists.torproject.org
To unsubscribe send an email to tor-relays-leave@lists.torproject.org

Hello.

Roger Dingledine wrote:

Since this is a Russian router we are talking about, one possibility
is that they are censoring the public Tor relay IP addresses, but
doing it only sometimes, or on some routes (which could look like
sometimes as the routes change).

Is the relay still useful to the network? I am seeing traffic pass
through it without issue. I could ask the host to move it to one of four
other locations in Russia. I chose Novosibirsk (OVB1) because it is near
mainland China and I figure it would be helpful to improve geographic
diversity, especially with routes to China (Novosibirsk is as far away
from Europe as possible). The other locations I can migrate to are Kazan
(KAZ1, looking glass 176.32.33.241), St. Petersburg (LED1, looking glass
194.87.196.227), and two DCs in Moscow (MOW1 and MOW2, LG 45.140.169.150
and 195.133.10.134, respectively). Their online ping test shows that all
authorities are accessible from all of their locations, at least now.

On a related note, I do have a relay in Hungary which has connectivity
issues with several of my other relays (4 out of 31). It passes a fair
bit of traffic regularly and has no issues with connecting to any of the
authorities. Would it be appropriate for me to try to ping every relay
in the consensus to try to map its connectivity? I am concerned that it
is harming the network by breaking the assumption that every relay can
reach every other relay. But then again, I don't know how many relays it
is unable to reach.

Regards,
forest

···

_______________________________________________
tor-relays mailing list -- tor-relays@lists.torproject.org
To unsubscribe send an email to tor-relays-leave@lists.torproject.org