Unsolicited connection to 87.118.122.30 despite EntryNodes and StrictNodes 1

I often monitor my network connection when using Tor using Wireshark. I have never observed it making connections to anything but the two guard nodes I have set in my torrc

Yesterday I saw it make a connection to this relay: Relay Search

My PC initiated the first connection, and In Wireshark it looked somewhat like a client connection to a guard node (same packet lengths and types etc.)

It did not send much data, 37 packets and 21KB in total.
(
This was concerning to me, so I checked on all their nodes in the same family and you can see an increase in guard node connections on all their exit nodes in the past few days

Example:

https://metrics.torproject.org/rs.html#details/4D0DF468DC816F8096702C2DA2C6FD67561F81C8
https://metrics.torproject.org/rs.html#details/26C28F29B611DF4DE23ACF5D9DC1EB4895EF5E8B

This is highly odd because normally exit nodes also set to run as guard nodes never have any guard traffic, and they all get the same exact looking bump?

Am I just paranoid or is something weird about all this?

Foo via Tor Project Forum:

I often monitor my network connection when using Tor using Wireshark. I have never observed it making connections to anything but the two guard nodes I have set in my torrc

Yesterday I saw it make a connection to this relay: Relay Search

My PC initiated the first connection, and In Wireshark it looked somewhat like a client connection to a guard node (same packet lengths and types etc.)

It did not send much data, 37 packets and 21KB in total.
(
This was concerning to me, so I checked on all their nodes in the same family and you can see an increase in guard node connections on all their exit nodes in the past few days

Example:

Relay Search
Relay Search

This is highly odd because normally exit nodes also set to run as guard nodes never have any guard traffic, and they all get the same exact looking bump?

Am I just paranoid or is something weird about all this?

It’s not guaranteed that exit nodes do not get used as Guard ones. We
rejected last week about 1000 relays (10% of the network capacity), see:
Safeguarding the Tor network: our commitment to network health and supporting relay operators | The Tor Project.

Those 1000 relays were non-exits and I believe a lot of them were Guard
nodes (it seems around 600 of them). I could imagine that this caused
some pressure on exits nodes with the Guard flag to be used as Guards as
well until things have calmed down a bit at least.

That’s just a theory, though. I’ve not looked at the data (yet).

···

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