[tor-relays] Guard flag got removed after only 48 hours of downtime.

William Kane ttallink at googlemail.com
Tue Jul 28 13:29:41 UTC 2020


Please discard the previous (empty) email, it was an error on my end.

Today, I noticed that my guard flag has been taken away:

https://metrics.torproject.org/rs.html#details/47E1157F7DA6DF80EC00D745D73ACD7B0A380BCF

Does this have to do with the recent two, major downtime's of the relay?

While I wasn't monitoring the server, the kernel decided (or rather
oom-killer did) to reap the tor process for consuming too much memory
(keep in mind, this is a virtual machine with only 1GB of RAM which
running another daemon consuming about ~92MB's of RAM).

I promptly restarted the relay, but the same thing happened again yesterday.

So today, I manually set a lower MaxMemInQueues value instead of
letting Tor calculate one for me - 640MB's instead of 732MB's.

Still, I am confused as for why the guard flag has been taken away - I
recently opted in to be a fallback directory mirror, does this have
anything to do with it?

The relay was stable and online for almost a year, so only 48 hours of
downtime shouldn't affect the variables qualifying a relay to become
and stay a guard that much?

If this is because of the directory mirror thing, then please take my
relay out of that pool - I want to stay a guard for a number of
reasons - mainly because my host is only hosting about 10 tor relays
unlike all the other big hosters that are commonly used - network
variety is very important or so I've been taught, especially when it
comes to guard relays.

If this is a mistake on Tor Project's end, I please ask for it to be
resolved - however, if it's the Directory Authorities disqualifying my
relay, then there's nothing to be done except to wait.

Greetings,
William Kane


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