Improve UX for obfs4 bridge operation
Right now there are some sharp edges if you want to operate an obfs4 bridge: you have to set up port forwarding, it's hard to know whether it's working, it's hard to figure out your bridge line, etc.
This is a master ticket for collecting these UX issues, so we can capture all of them and make progress on fixing them.
Activity
Trac:
Child Ticket(s): #31719 (moved), #29128 (moved), #19496 (moved), #30472 (moved), #20943 (moved), #31153 (moved), #5304 (moved), #31103 (moved)
Over here, I emailed several bridge operators whose obfs4 port was not reachable. The ones who got back to me all had one of the following two issues:
- Several people thought that only the ORPort must be reachable. They didn't know that obfs4 needs a separate port. We need to make this clear in our documentation.
- Some people have obfs4 listen on a locally-scoped address. Our spec says that this is fine but it doesn't seem to work in practice because Tor ends up writing the locally-scoped address into its descriptor, e.g.:
transport obfs4 10.0.0.5:PORT. This looks like a bug. I don't think a locally-scoped address should ever end up in a descriptor.
mentioned in issue #30477 (moved)
mentioned in issue #30777 (moved)
mentioned in issue #31103 (moved)
mentioned in issue #29128 (moved)
mentioned in issue #30472 (moved)
mentioned in issue #31153 (moved)
mentioned in issue #31719 (moved)
mentioned in issue tpo/community/outreach#30777 (closed)
