Hi there, my first post and not sure if this is the right place to ask but having tried the ‘Tor stuck bootstrapping at 5%’ fix I am still no closer to a solution.
All has worked fine for a couple of months running bitcoin knots; electrs; datum; mempool. Now however its all gone haywire as Tor is not connecting. I have done full cold restarts ( no power ) service restarts; Tor resets both types; and I am not knowledgeable enough to trouble shoot what is gone wrong. ( I have put an unfiltered wireguard vpn config into my router now as I wonder if my ISP didn’t like the Tor traffic ) Firewall rules on Tor Exit nodes are suppressed. Nothing seems to work.
Some direction would be awesome - I don’t want to share a lot of logs here until someone can tell me what should be looked at - I have looked at all logs for all services at this stage - they are not happy!
Thanks
OS Logs:
2025-08-25T13:08:19+09:30 ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ SPANTRACE ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
2025-08-25T13:08:19+09:30 0: startos::net::tor::torctl
2025-08-25T13:08:19+09:30 at startos/src/net/tor.rs:250
2025-08-25T13:08:19+09:30 Backtrace omitted. Run with RUST_BACKTRACE=1 environment variable to display it.
2025-08-25T13:08:19+09:30 Run with RUST_BACKTRACE=full to include source snippets., kind: Tor, revision: None }
2025-08-25T13:08:21+09:30 2025-08-25T03:38:21.141954Z INFO torctl : startos::net::tor: Tor is started
2025-08-25T13:08:24+09:30 2025-08-25T03:38:24.673208Z DEBUG run_main :check : startos::manager::health: Checking health of bitcoind
2025-08-25T13:08:39+09:30 2025-08-25T03:38:39.833856Z DEBUG run_main :check : startos::manager::health: Checking health of bitcoind
2025-08-25T13:08:51+09:30 2025-08-25T03:38:51.199504Z ERROR startos::net::tor: Tor Daemon Error: Tor stuck bootstrapping at 5%: Restarting tor
2025-08-25T13:08:51+09:30 2025-08-25T03:38:51.199545Z DEBUG startos::net::tor: Error { source:
2025-08-25T13:08:51+09:30 0: Tor stuck bootstrapping at 5%
2025-08-25T13:08:51+09:30 Location:
2025-08-25T13:08:51+09:30 startos/src/net/tor.rs:354
2025-08-25T13:08:51+09:30 ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ SPANTRACE ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
5% is a number that hints at blocking at the router level as much as perhaps the ISP level. It’s equivalent to starting Tor with no internet connection. What that means in your precise case I’m not sure, but unless you’ve done any unsupported modification of Tor on your server via the command line, we can probably rule out anything server-side.
I suppose you’d have mentioned of anything was done on your router… modifications, changes etc? Is it an ISP router? Do/Can they trigger upgrades remotely?
And when you say you’ve tried the “fix”, what are you referring to exactly?
Hi Stu,
No I have not done any Tor modifications on the StartOS server - I would not know how to; had no reason to.
I have a new router (UDR7); which worked fine initially I am almost positive as my miner was happy and LND allowed AlbyHub payments to flow.
There is an existing post from last year (I think) that talks about the Tor bootstrap stuck message - it talks about reseting Tor within the StartOS ( experimental features ) doing restarts of Services and Server - so I did those things to no avail.
I have just ripped my network config away and rebuilt it back up.
Tor is excluded from Active Detection.
Zone Rule added for the Server on port 9050 where it sits within Internal Zone
2025-08-27T05:45:12+09:30 Bootstrapped 5% (conn): Connecting to a relay
2025-08-27T05:45:13+09:30 New control connection opened from 127.0.0.1.
2025-08-27T05:45:13+09:30 Opening Control listener on /run/tor/control
2025-08-27T05:45:13+09:30 Opened Control listener connection (ready) on /run/tor/control
2025-08-27T05:45:43+09:30 Interrupt: exiting cleanly.
2025-08-27T05:45:43+09:30 Stopping tor@default.service - Anonymizing overlay network for TCP…
2025-08-27T05:45:43+09:30 tor@default.service: Deactivated successfully.
2025-08-27T05:45:43+09:30 Stopped tor@default.service - Anonymizing overlay network for TCP.
I have stopped all services and continued to try lenghty device restarts following Tor restarts but no joy. Can’t find anything out there to help. Doesn’t feel that the logs are giving the full picture of what is actually happening for it not to be able to obtain what it needs
2025-08-28T01:50:51+09:30 I learned some more directory information, but not enough to build a circuit: We need more microdescriptors: we have 4931/8931, and can only build 17% of likely paths. (We have 56% of guards bw, 55% of midpoint bw, and 55% of exit bw = 17% of path bw.)
AI says to go and add Bridges into the Tor config… Is that what I should be doing?
A reset of tor, with wipe state enabled, resolved this issue. The setting can be found under System>Experimental Features.
If this reset does not resolve the stuck at 5% bootstrap, your tor connection is most likely being blocked at the network level. If you live in a country that forces ISP’s to block tor, you may need to tunnel through a VPN to bypass the block. Otherwise, a router or firewall settings is the most likely culprit.
