On 12/17/13 10:31 PM, Nick Mathewson wrote:
212 Increase Acceptable Consensus Age
This proposal suggests that we increase the maximum age of a consensus that clients are willing to use when they can't find a new one, in order to make the network robust for longer against a failure to reach consensus. In my opinion, we should do that. If I recall correctly, there was some tor-dev discussion on this one that should get incorporated into a final, implementable version. (11/2013)
Hi Nick,
I agree with the idea that clients should accept an old consensus up to 3 days instead of 1. It's stressful enough to nag directory authority operators to look after their machines if they fail to produce a consensus for a few hours. I did that a couple of times, and it stressed me out every single time. I don't want to imagine how bad such a situation would be during the holidays or CCC.
You mention a tor-dev discussion above that should get incorporated. Do you have a link? A quick search in my inbox didn't help.
Here's some feedback from reading the proposal:
- Section 6.1 of dir-spec.txt says that "Circuits SHOULD NOT be built until the client has [...] a live consensus network status", but that means 3 hours after valid-after, AFAIK. Should we rather specify here that clients MAY use a consensus for up to 3 days after its valid-after time if they don't find a more recent one? Or is this something to leave to the implementation and leave open in dir-spec.txt?
- If the new 3 days constant should become part of dir-spec.txt, what about the suggested time after which old router descriptors may safely be removed from caches? (Would you accept patches to dir-spec.txt that specify related time constants that are currently only written to the code?)
- Do we really plan to raise the 3 days to something higher when the "proposals related to ticket #7126 [...] are complete and implemented"? If so, would it make sense to make the 3 days constant a new consensus parameter, rather than hard-code it?
- I didn't review the Implementation Notes part in detail, yet. But it feels wrong that OLD_ROUTER_DESC_MAX_AGE is now only 3 days 18 hours when it was 5 days before.
All the best, Karsten