teor <teor2345@gmail.com> writes:

On 29 Oct 2017, at 01:19, George Kadianakis <desnacked@riseup.net> wrote:

Hey Tim,

just wanted to ask a clarifying question wrt #21969.

First of all there are various forms of #21969 (aka the "missing

descriptors for some of our primary entry guards" issue). Sometimes it

occurs for 10 mins and then goes away, whereas for other people it

disables their service permanently (until restart). I call this the

hardcore case of #21969. It has happened to me and disabled my service

for days, and I've also seen it happen to other people (e.g. dgoulet).

So. We have found various md-related bugs and put them as children of

#21969. Do you think we have found the bugs that can cause the hardcore

case of #21969? That is, is any of these bugs (or a bug combo) capable

of permanently disabling an onion service?

Yes, this bug is disabling:

Thanks for the reply, Tim.

#23862, where we don't update guard state unless we have enough

directory info.

When tor gets in a state where it doesn't have enough directory info

due to another bug, this makes sure it will never get out of that state.

Because it will never mark its directory guards as up when it gets a

new consensus, and therefore it will never fetch microdescs, find out

it has enough directory info, and build circuits.

Hmm, just want to make sure I get this.

My understanding with #23862 is that Tor would never mark its directory
guards as up like you say, but it _would still_ fetch microdescs using
fallback directories because of the way
directory_pick_generic_dirserver() works. Isn't that the case?