Hey all,
I'm sorry if this is something obvious, I've searched for a day and couldn't find satisfactory information. Feel free to point me to relevant resources if I missed them.
So, I'd like to run Tor in a P2P setting on mobile phones ( https://github.com/coronanet). In general, everything works as expected. My issues are with the fine grained behaviors of the Tor proxy wrt onion addresses and network connectivity.
As long as I allow a stable internet connection to Tor, everything's fine. What I wanted to check is how Tor behaves if I start pulling the rug from underneath it in various states.
I've tried keeping Tor offline (network disabled), publish an onion into the service and then enable networking afterwards (SETCONF DisableNetwork 0). This also seems to work, when Tor goes online it publishes the onion that was added offline and I can access it (at least sending a HEARTBEAT signal reports "1 v3 INTRODUCE2 cells and attempted to launch 1 rendezvous circuits"). So far so good.
Now comes the more interesting test: while networking is enabled and seemingly everything works, I cut off network access at the router level (i.e. simulate a phone losing WiFi signal / turning off data). Similar to my previous test, I've created a new onion in this scenario too, then reenabled WiFI. Unfortunately, whilst my first onion comes back online, the second one is lost in some black hole. My guess is that Tor **thinks** it's online, fails to register it, then some internal state gets messed up.
If I try to list the current onions (GETINFO onions/current), both appear. If I try to list some infos about them via `GETINFO hs/service/desc/id/`, both look the same, reporting their own crypto keys. However, only the first one response, the second never gets router, neither noticed by the local Tor instance.
At this point I'd be perfectly happy is this weird scenario was "not meant to work by design", as long as Tor could explicitly tell me somehow that "sorry, onion X is dead, sort it out yourself". I'd be even happier if this worked though. Maybe this is a bug that was fixed in a later version? I'm on 0.3.5.10.
Thanks, Peter