Hi, I got the guard flag on my relay before the stable flag, literally just got the stable flag yesterday and the guard flag a few days ago.

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-------- Original Message -------- Subject: [tor-relays] Flags? Local Time: December 19, 2016 2:52 PM UTC Time: December 19, 2016 12:52 PM From: balbea16@gmx.de To: tor-relays@lists.torproject.org

Hi There, I assume, that this has been discussed here already pretty often. However, it seems to be, that the "stable flag" is only assigned to relays with a static, or at least long lasting, IP address. It also seems to be, that the stable flag is mandatory to get the guard flag. If so, that would mean: Dynamic address = no chance to obtain the guard flag. Is that the truth? Tnx Mike

On 12/19/16 07:52, balbea16 wrote:

Hi There, I assume, that this has been discussed here already pretty often. However, it seems to be, that the "stable flag" is only assigned to relays with a static, or at least long lasting, IP address. It also seems to be, that the stable flag is mandatory to get the guard flag. If so, that would mean: Dynamic address = no chance to obtain the guard flag. Is that the truth? Tnx Mike

Anyone interested in what each flag means may find the following section of dir-spec.txt very helpful.

https://gitweb.torproject.org/torspec.git/tree/dir-spec.txt#n2207

Line 2207, or section 3.4.2 if the link doesn't jump to that line on your device. Specifically for Stable, the following is written.

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"Stable" -- A router is 'Stable' if it is active, and either its Weighted MTBF is at least the median for known active routers or its Weighted MTBF corresponds to at least 7 days. Routers are never called Stable if they are running a version of Tor known to drop circuits stupidly. (0.1.1.10-alpha through 0.1.1.16-rc are stupid this way.)

To calculate weighted MTBF, compute the weighted mean of the lengths of all intervals when the router was observed to be up, weighting intervals by $\alpha^n$, where $n$ is the amount of time that has passed since the interval ended, and $\alpha$ is chosen so that measurements over approximately one month old no longer influence the weighted MTBF much.

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Hope that helps.

Matt