[tor-project] Remove mercurius4 obfs4 bridge from Tor Browser?

[Griffin Boyce]

David Fifield wrote:
> According to my and Lynn Tsai's bridge reachability measurements, the
> default obfs4 bridge mercurius4 has not been running for a few months.
> 
> It was refusing connections in March and April, and more recently has
> just been timing out. Time to remove it?

Hi David,

   I decommissioned mercurius4 back in April.  It had some odd behavior 
that I strongly suspect was an issue with the ISP (digital ocean).  The 
bridge would seem to be up all the time (I even set it to restart 
process and SMS me when it went down), but was inexplicably slow and 
ultimately started refusing connections.  I ruled out iptables issues 
and a few people couldn't figure the issue out either.  Then I ran other 
test services on that box, and they were fine.  There didn't seem to be 
a way forward with the bridge, so I shut it down.  =/

   If I were to run a large bridge again, I'd probably use Greenhost or 
run it from Harvard.

best,
Griffin


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