[tor-relays] Maybe the next step in russian Tor discrimination

[Tor Relays]

Hello,

i have a relay at profitserver.ru at their Chelyabinsk location and
recently the relay fell out of the consensus.

I can ping all authorities with IPv4 and IPv6 and torproject.org is not
blocked.
I opened the ControlPort and tried to manually create circuits to the
authorities.

extendcircuit 0 authoritynickname
getinfo circuit-status

I observed that i can successfully create circuits to no more than three
authorities and it seems to change to which authorities i can create
circuits.
The unsuccessful circuits stay in EXTENDED but never reach BUILT until Tor
gives up eventually.

Currently no other of my russian relays are affected.
I am not an expert with the ControlPort but i hope this is proving what i
tried to prove.


Here is the conversation with the support:

me:
Hello,
I am running a (non-exit) Tor relay on the VPS and it stopped working a few
weeks ago.
I can ping the Tor authorities IP addresses but when i try to manually
create a Tor circuit it seems to timeout 6 out of 9 times which indicates
some blocking attempts on your (or your upstream providers) side.
I have a couple of other Tor relays in russia and i have never seen
routinely failing manually created circuits to the Tor authorities.
Do you block Tor or do you otherwise mess with Tor traffic?

support agent:
Hello, i can't say something about TOR network, now.
We have black box from government, which can control traffic, and perhaps
block TOR.
Ourselves don't block TOR

me:
Thanks for your answer.
The TSPU from Roskomnadzor that is doing Deep Packet Inspection?
I feel with you and all the russian citizens... :(
Good luck

support agent:
Maybe it's a black box


If this is indeed their blackbox messing with Tor traffic then it is quite
subtile because it does not block torproject.org and pings to the
authorities are going through.
The relay suddenly was online for one consensus in the last weeks and i can
still use it when i manually set it as a Guard in my Tor client.

So if you run a relay in russia and you experience weird stuff with it then
you may not only want to check if you can reach the authorities by ping but
you may want to try to manually craft a circuit to all of them.


Hope that helps anyone

Cheers
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