Hello there,
For the past week I’ve been running a Tor relay using the Tor‑Relay plugin on my OpenSense. While the relay appears to be functioning, I’ve noticed a few irregularities:
- Selective blocking: Some IP addresses that connect to me are being denied by default, whereas others with similar characteristics connect without any issue.
- Low bandwidth usage: The relay isn’t consuming much bandwidth. I’m not sure whether this is normal while the relay is still learning its capacity or if something else is limiting traffic.
- No connections on port 9030: So far, I haven’t seen any inbound connections to the directory port (9030).
For testing, the following IP is reachable via ICMP 
- 109.199.164.117 – Port 9001 (OR) / DIR 9030
Could you advise on why these behaviors are occurring and whether any configuration changes are needed?
Thanks for your help, and stay hydrated!
Hello.
stay.hydrated834＠passmail.net wrote:
1. Selective blocking: Some IP addresses that connect to me are being
denied by default, whereas others with similar characteristics connect
without any issue.
I'm not entirely sure what this means. What is denying them and how do
you know?
2. Low bandwidth usage: The relay isn’t consuming much bandwidth. I’m
not sure whether this is normal while the relay is still learning its
capacity or if something else is limiting traffic.
This is normal. It can take a few weeks for a new relay to get up to
speed. See The lifecycle of a new relay | The Tor Project. Speed
also depends on location. Your relay is in Germany where most relays are
right now, so expect traffic to ramp up rapidly over a couple weeks.
3. No connections on port 9030: So far, I haven’t seen any inbound
connections to the directory port (9030).
DirPort has been deprecated for non-authoritative relays and it's no
longer published in the consensus. That's totally normal, and directory
requests go through the ORPort now. You have the V2Dir flag, which means
you are, indeed, serving directory requests.
109.199.164.117 – Port 9001 (OR) / DIR 9030
I can't ping that host from 94.156.152.8 (RO) or 102.211.56.20 (ZA), but
connections to 9001 and 9030 succeed just fine.
And thank you for running a relay!
Regards,
forest
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Hi everyone,
Thank you for the reply and the information you provided.
While preparing my response about the blocked traffic, I wanted to clarify the NAT and WAN rules in the screenshots and replace the aliases with the actual IP addresses. During that process I discovered that I (the numb nut of an administrator) forgot to fill in the NAT alias, so there was never an active NAT rule only the WAN rule was present. Because both the NAT and WAN rules are now active, the Tor relay is functioning correctly: no traffic to port 9001 is being blocked, and outbound traffic is unrestricted. I wonder why some connections were allowed by the WAN rule while others were denied and are now only allowed due to the NAT rule.
Bandwidth:
Average throughput: ~60 Mbps (occasionally up to 140 Mbps)
Recent spikes: short bursts up to 420 Mbps training i guess?
Due to frequent firewall restarts while I’m re‑configuring my network. I expect the traffic to stabilize as the network settles and after the training finished, and I’m happy if the relay can make use of any unused capacity. 1000Mbps would be the Maximum so there is alot of room to grow. 
Unexpected traffic bursts
Every few hours I see dozens of Tor nodes connecting to my relay for 2–5 minutes, resulting in 1,000–7,500 connections dropping. These bursts don’t line up with the bandwidth spikes as far as i seen. My CPU usage, which is usually around 1 %, can rise to about 1.2 % during those periods. Im glad i already thought its static. I don’t think this is an attack—nothing I’ve seen, even a smart bulb, generates comparable traffic. I’m wondering if I still have a misconfiguration somewhere.
Regarding Snowflakes
Is it possible to Route all of my phones (apps) traffic still through WireGuard back to home while allowing Orbot to use the mobile network to open a Snowflake relay (my IP changes every 24 hours after a phone reboot). I have an unlimited 25Mbit not fast but steady. Im on GrapheneOS
Screenshots
I’ve attached screenshots that highlight exactly what is being blocked, so you can see the traffic patterns I described.
Thanks again to everyone who runs relays; your experience helped me finally get mine working. <3
Stay hydrated!
Cheers
(attachments)
