Web Tunnel Ramp Time?

[iliketorrelays]

Hi

My WebTunnel has been online for >30 days with a static IP: Relay Search

It doesn’t appear to be getting much (any?) usage, but it is showing as working, tests have confirmed it works and it is being distributed in Settings:

Zooming in you can see these are only short, sharp bursts of traffic:

Am I being impatient or is it possible there’s something wrong in my setup?

It might be also worth adding that I have noticed that it often shows up as offline on metrics.torproject.org (even when it isn’t), as I posted about here: Help debugging seemingly unstable relay

[atari]

Have asked the same question 3 weeks ago, no answer so far.

The “bursts” you see is most likely bridgestrap from a German IP, see your /var/lib/tor/stats/bridge-stats.

Tor in Russia: A call for more WebTunnel bridges

Only one of my webtunnel bridges which have no bridge distribution method set in torrc ( #BridgeDistribution) and thus were assigned to a random distribution pool shows traffic, the others just idle, except the regular check from bridgestrap. They were either assigned HTTPS or settings, so it does not really seem random. The one showing traffic was in the rotation on the bridges.torproject.org. When will the settings webtunnel bridges see some traffic? Guess the expectation for new bridge oper…

Your bridge showing offline from time to time is related to not exposing your ORPort (which is highly recommended). See these 2 tickets:

Recommend not exposing OrPort for bridges (#129) · Issues · The Tor Project / Anti-censorship / Team · GitLab

webtunnel-from-source instructions close your ORPort without explaining that your bridge will seem down (#329) · Issues · The Tor Project / Web / community · GitLab

@iliketorrelays

Am I being impatient or is it possible there’s something wrong in my setup?

If you can use your bridge and its shown as “webtunnel: functional” when you check here: https://bridges.torproject.org/status?id=$YOURFINGERPRINT → try being patient, I’m trying too…

[iliketorrelays]

Thanks @atari - it is showing as functional and I can use it, so I will continue to be patient!

As I’m not the only one it would be really helpful to hear any guidance from others on this (successful webtunnel admins? tor team?). I set this up because I saw the call for more WebTunnel Bridges and if I can get this 1 working I can look to spin up more, but if it’s not being used that would not make sense.

[meskio]

I just replied to this question in the original thread: Tor in Russia: A call for more WebTunnel bridges - #16 by meskio

TL;DR: it takes time until we hand out each bridge to make it harder for censors to block them. So is normal to don’t have traffic for weeks.

Thank you for running the bridges.

[iliketorrelays]

Thank you! That’s helpful to know!