[tor-relays] Re: Having trouble with setting up a relay in a censored country.

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1

Hey there,

to efficiently help you, could you please post your /etc/tor/torrc?

Otherwise, the relays that you see in Russia are likely on a host that does not enforce the ban of the Tor Project.

However, your nyx data is quite weird.

Did you run it as the Tor user?

  • sudo -u tor nyx

Otherwise, make sure that your ControlPort is opened, and that you use CookieAuthentication.

Thank you,
-GH

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On Tuesday, January 14th, 2025 at 8:50 PM, nyyymi via tor-relays tor-relays@lists.torproject.org wrote:

Hello. For the past few days I’ve been trying to open a tor-relay on my old laptop running arch. The tor service starts fine but when I check nyx no traffic goes through me, both download and upload is 0. Nyx shows Unknown:portnumber. I doubt that the port is closed or somehow unavailable since arch’s defaults are wide open. And for some reason my tor version (0.4.8.13) shows up as “unknown” as well. I thought the issue may lie in torproject’s ban in Russia but somehow other people run relays just fine? (https://metrics.torproject.org/rs.html#search/country:ru). I’ve set up obsf4 as well but It didn’t change anything

Im quite new in all of this so bear with me.
Thanks

-Arttu

2

Hi,

sorry for the late reply, I was busy working.

The only thing that stands out to me immediately is that you configured two separate ControlPort authentication methods:

HashedControlPassword XX:XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
CookieAuthentication 1

You might want to comment out the first line.

Otherwise, everything else looks correct.

P.S: Since you do not run a bridge, there is no need to un-comment the obfs4 related settings:

ServerTransportPlugin obfs4 exec /usr/bin/obfs4proxy

ServerTransportListenAddr obfs4 0.0.0.0:9002

This will do nothing, unless you actually configure the relay to be a bridge.

Try to comment both HashedControlPassword and the obfs4 settings, and restart the relay.

nyx should now work - additionally, you might want to check the log using journalctl -u tor.

There should be a line stating that your ORPort is reachable from the outside, and that your server descriptor has been published.

If that is not the case, then I would conclude that your host / ISP is up to some “funny” business, and you might not be able to run a normal relay.

Since I can’t find any relay with your specified nickname, I assume that it is still not working.

However, you could still run an obfs4 bridge, which should work fine in Russia - if you can do this, please do… any relay or bridge not run by intelligence agencies or government helps!

Regards,
-GH

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On Wednesday, January 15th, 2025 at 3:23 PM, nyyymi nyyymi@protonmail.com wrote:

Hi, here is my torrc file. Enabling cookieauth didn’t change anything