Tor relay keeps stopping since 0.4.7.8

Add-Ons
1

I run multiple Tor bridges, relays and exits. One of those is a simple relay at home, which I moved to IPFire some time ago. Since the addon was updated to v0.4.7.8, the Tor daemon keeps stopping - seemingly randomly. My stats on Tor Metrics have gone downhill, and I can’t see why it keeps happening.

The /var/log/tor folder is empty, and when it crashes/stops I have to SSH into the router and issue /etc/init.d/tor restart, at which point it sparks to life again.

Does anyone please have any ideas? My redacted config is below for reference. Thanks in advance.

Sandbox 1
HardwareAccel 1
ControlPort 9051
ExitPolicyRejectPrivate 1
ORPort 8080 IPv4Only
DirPort 8081 IPv4Only
Address {redacted}
Nickname {redacted}
ContactInfo {redacted}
ExitPolicy reject *:*
RelayBandwidthRate 2560 KB
RelayBandwidthBurst 3200 KB
2

Hi,

hm, this may have something to do with the ongoing DDoS attack against Tor (it also impacted some of my relays), but that is just a suspicion.

On IPFire, Tor logs into syslog, so

grep "Tor" /var/log/messages

should turn up all the Tor logs generated on your machine. Is something in there that obviously indicates a failure?

Thanks, and best regards,
Peter Müller

2 Likes
3

I actually hadn’t considered the DDOS, as it hasn’t affected my other relays or my exit in this way. It’s possible though, of course. The logs (link) don’t seem to show much, they just stop and restart as though nothing happened; no error messages or crashes per se. As you can see, it’s affecting my uptime badly. I think I’ll just disable this relay for now, as it’s down more than it’s up anyway at the moment.

Bridge (image)

Exit (image)

IPFire relay with repetitive downtime (image)

4

Hi,

I don’t think that’s necessary, as Tor can cope with flaky relays. :slight_smile:

But indeed, there is nothing in the logs that would obviously point to any direction. My only guess at this point is that Tor’s sandbox may contain a bug that crashes the Tor daemon. To verify that:

  1. Are you running this on x86_64 or another architecture?
  2. Does commenting out the Sandbox 1 line from the torrc file manually cause things to be more stable?

Thanks, and best regards,
Peter Müller

5

Yes it’s x86 in this instance. I had only recently re-enabled the sandbox after bugs in previous releases of the Tor addon for IPFire. I have commented it out and restarted the service, so I’ll see if it stabilises things and report back. Thanks for the pointers. :slight_smile:

6

As promised. Disabling the sandbox has led to stability returning. No crashes/hard stops since then.

7

Hi,

thank you for reporting back.

Then I am afraid we will have to defer you to the Tor folks, since it looks like Tor’s sandbox feature contains a bug you are running in. It would be great if you could report this issue to them. :slight_smile:

Thanks, and best regards,
Peter Müller

2 Likes