On Jan 13, 2012, at 1:27 PM, Nils Vogels wrote:

Hey Sebastian, Roger, On 13/01/2012, Sebastian Hahn mail@sebastianhahn.net wrote:

...

Ah, I see. ides not having a current consensus is different from ides being down. Ides still is running the stable Tor version and needs to be upgraded to 0.2.3.x to be allowed to vote along with the other dirauths, so it doesn't immediately know about the new consensus. I don't know when ides will be upgraded, but I hope the answer is soon.

Let me know if there is a need for stable authorities with speedy admins. I'm sure the Dutch hacker community (which I am very much involved with) can lend a hand and/or a high-bw host.

Hi Nils,

I'm pasting some stuff here from the "consensus update request" thread, also on tor-relays:

On Jan 8, 2012, at 5:45 PM, Roger Dingledine wrote:

On Sun, Jan 08, 2012 at 03:35:16PM +0100, Sebastian Hahn wrote:

...

The problem is that in the current situation, it gets worse with more authorities, not better. Our voting mechanism needs an overhaul :/

Indeed.

The other problem is that we simply have too many clients out there. And we've taught them all to be eager to keep updated, so they're harder to partition. But it's really a volume thing at this point. We need a more scalable way of keeping clients informed about network topology. In our copious free time, while also doing everything else that needs doing. :/

Anyway, crisis averted, this time.

--Roger

Hope that helps make it clearer why adding a new authority in the short term doesn't actually help us currently.

Thanks Sebastian