[tor-relays] Re: Hetzner Netscan False Positives

Thanks to appliedprivacy for the update on outreach with Hetzner, and to everyone sharing operational experiences.

A few clarifications, grounded in Tor Project guidance:

Temporary relay unreachability due to outages is an expected operating condition, and Tor is designed to adapt to changing relay availability
https://community.torproject.org/policies/relays/expectations-for-relay-operators/
Tor’s community resources note that relay operators should “try to avoid the following hosters,” listing Hetzner, based on documented operational friction reported by relay operators
https://community.torproject.org/relay/community-resources/good-bad-isps/
For context, there were two events: emergency maintenance before Christmas, and an outage before New Year’s; root cause is still under investigation, with only a physical link loss on provider equipment confirmed so far.
Raw relay counts are a poor proxy for concentration risk, which Tor already models via families, bandwidth weighting, and path selection.
Tor guidance also notes in Section 3 of the Expectations for Relay Operators:
“Don’t block outgoing connections. Tor relays need to be able to reach all other Tor relays.”
https://community.torproject.org/policies/relays/expectations-for-relay-operators/#do-not-interfere-with-the-tor-network

Best,
Tor at 1AEO

On Saturday, January 3rd, 2026 at 5:30 AM, Manu via tor-relays <tor-relays@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

I have my Tor node at Hetzner as well and my IP was blocked recently because I was not able to reply to their mail quick enough. However I reserved a separate IP for the Tor node so my other services running on my server were not affected by the block. Maybe this would be a solution for you?

Best regards

Manu

On 1/1/26 10:39 PM, Diyar Ciftci via tor-relays wrote:
Good evening,

I still don't know what the cause is and got the same email again in same time period. I can't really keep risking this as I have many other services running on this server with largest being mirror.diyarciftci.xyz. I already had my IP blocked once before. For the time being, I will be blocking 1AEO too. Looking at metrics, it looks like all got bounced at the same time as when the report came in. When good news comes back, I have no issue with unblocking.

Kind regards,

Diyar Ciftci
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