[tor-relays] Dirport9030

[Roger Dingledine]

On Sun, Mar 22, 2020 at 05:16:27PM +0100, Nuno Rego wrote:
> As I said, I'm still learning. I have a server at Hetzner with a monthly limit of 20TB, and I am trying to adjust the speed so that it does not exceed 20TB at the end of the month. The problem is that whenever I place the BandwidthRate and BandwidthBurst above 10MB I lose the Guard, HSdir and V2Dir flags. On the page https://metrics.torproject.org/rs.html#search/TugaOnion I see that DirPort is 0 instead of 9030. I have the BandwidthRate and BandwidthBurst at 9MB and everything is fine, but I will reach the end of the month and I only spent about 10TB.

Check your logs. They likely say something like

"Not advertising DirPort (Reason: AccountingMax enabled)"

So your relay is indeed opening the DirPort, but it is opting to leave it
out of the descriptor that it publishes (i.e. not mention it to anybody),
in order to save its limited bandwidth for more important traffic.

You can read more about the design here:
https://gitweb.torproject.org/tor.git/tree/src/feature/relay/router.c?h=tor-0.4.2.7#n1199

Your options include:

(A) Leave your BandwidthRate at 9MBytes, but crank up your BandwidthBurst
super high so the rate limiting rarely actually kicks in. In theory the
bandwidth authority measurers should decide that you're really quite
fast compared to the other relays that claim 9MBytes/s, and assign you
more traffic. (I say 'in theory' because the bwauths are a source of
much randomness and chaos these days, so it is easy to describe what we
hope they will do, but harder to predict what they will actually do. :)

(B) Turn both your BandwidthRate and BandwidthBurst way up, so that you
use a lot of traffic even only in the 'middle hop' spot. It's hard to
say how this one will work out in practice, but in theory (there's that
phrase again) the bwauths should recognize that you can handle a lot of
load as a middle hop, and direct more traffic to you there.

(C) Sit back, relax, and be pleased that you're offering 10TBytes/mo
to the network.

All of these are valid directions to go in, I would say.

Thanks!
--Roger