No traffic on obfs4 bridge

Question

I am running an obfs4 bridge on my raspberry pi since 10 days now and haven't seen a single client since then.

My torrc looks like this:

RunAsDaemon 1
ORPort 9001
ExitRelay 0
BridgeRelay 1
ControlPort 9051
CookieAuthentication 1
ServerTransportPlugin obfs4 exec /usr/bin/obfs4proxy
ExtORPort auto

From the logs I can read that the obfs4 service is listening on port 39147, so I have port forwarded it along with port 9001.

The self-test is also positive:

Jul 07 13:38:56.000 [notice] Self-testing indicates your ORPort is reachable from the outside. Excellent. Publishing server descriptor.
Jul 07 13:39:00.000 [notice] Performing bandwidth self-test...done.

Is this completely normal behaviour and due to the fact that bridges are not listed publicly? Are there simply not many obfs4 clients around? Or is it a misconfiguration?

I'd really like to contribute to the tor project as best as I can, and due to having low bandwidth running a bridge seems the only way.

Answer 1

I have the same problem. Did you restart tor or reboot your pi very often before you got all working and up for longer time? After i set up my bridge the first time i allways had 1-3 unique clients when i checked the logs. But i had some config problems and restarted the system too often, now i dont see unique clients any more. I think the auth-servers stop publishing the bridge when its not “stable” compared to others that are up for 4 months or even longer.

But as you i am not 100% sure.