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.
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
Looking through the manual (https://tb-manual.torproject.org/), watching youtube videos about tor and networking in general, asking questions online, and looking on google. I use Arch Linux, so this page was also very helpful: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Tor