The question is purely academic. I am not having technical issues and I am NOT asking for technical support.
I understand that technically, my ISP had probably choked the previous port.
I also know that some nation states, organizations or other actors - such as ISPs - block Tor connections for whatever (political?) reasons.
What I don’t understand is what legal grounds they have to do this. I have read the Terms of Service. Twice. And there is nothing explicit about having specific ports blocked for whatever reason. It does say that they have the right to limit my bandwidth if they deem that my usage is impacting their other customers’ connection negatively. Perhaps they somehow force it into this paragraph? As in, according to them, running a Tor relay doesn’t count as “normal use”?
If you have any experience or knowledge on the matter, please advise. 😊
The question is purely academic. I am not having technical issues and I am NOT asking for technical support.
I had no idea port configuration is prone to such… Software hiccups? 🤣 I am running the bridge on a Raspberry Pi 5 with DietPie and my router is a Raspberry Pi 4B running Openwrt. When the bridge speeds and number of connected users dropped, I did do a full system upgrade, which included some packages, the kernel and an EEPROM update. Since the upgrade didn’t improve the stats of the Tor bridge for some days, I assumed that my ISP was choking my connection - which, now that I think of it, shouldn’t have had to do with it being a Tor connection, because the whole point of a Tor bridge is that it’s obfuscated in order to allow people to use the Tor network in restrictive jurisdictions… 🤔 Anyhow, having assumed that my ISP had pinpointed my Tor ports, I changed them, and now I can see, at least on a hardware level, judging from the LEDs on the switch port that carries the Tor connection, that the speeds/usage are picking up again. Another thing that makes me think that it had to do with the port, regardless of whether it was my ISP doing something or one of those port errors you mentioned, is that meanwhile, my other router, which is sharing the same upstream bandwidth, was still operating at several hundreds of Mbps, while the Tor bridge was “coughing up” a few bytes here and there.