I am learning the very basics of networking and I am trying to set up a simple Tor Bridge node in my home pc (Arch Linux). I have set ORPort to 443, and set up port-forwarding from 443 -> 443. I set the bandwidth limit to 30 MB/s, and bursts of 35 MB/s, and set the Bridge option. I start tor using ‘sudo systemctl start tor’, and use nyx to monitor traffic.

In the connections menu I can see that I am part of several circuits (6 at the moment), and I have seen a few inbound and outbound connections show up. The Download and Upload bar charts just show a few spikes of < 1 KB/sec. The only notices that I have are “Self-testing indicates your ORPort is reachable from the outside. Publishing server description” and “Performing bandwidth self-test… done.” I have left the server running over night but I do not see any improvement.

Is this normal for a new Bridge node, or have I likely configured something improperly? I have tested completely shutting off the router’s firewall and it made no difference.

  • @ZalamanderOP
    3•3 years ago

    I was under the wrong impression that dynamic IPs were not good for relays because I thought that the system would identify the node as brand-new each time that my IP changed, but now I see that this is not the case! After looking a bit more into it I think that it will be a bit more useful if I run a non-exit relay instead of a bridge. I will pay attention and if I see that the demand for dynamic IP bridges increases do to massive censorship I can make the switch and hope I can reach the right people.

    Thanks a lot for looking this up! It is a definitely a fun way to learn, and always nice to contribute even if it is a little.

    • @Raziel
      1•3 years ago

      Were did you learn to use Tor? I would like to learn the basics good privacy practices to use it as a regular user and in the future to get into contributing to the network like you are aming to do