[tor-bugs] #3825 [Tor Hidden Services]: Hidden service unavailable even though I know its up

[Tor Bug Tracker & Wiki]

#3825: Hidden service unavailable even though I know its up
---------------------------------+------------------------------------------
 Reporter:  atoruser             |          Owner:                  
     Type:  defect               |         Status:  new             
 Priority:  normal               |      Milestone:                  
Component:  Tor Hidden Services  |        Version:  Tor: unspecified
 Keywords:                       |         Parent:                  
   Points:                       |   Actualpoints:                  
---------------------------------+------------------------------------------
 I run several onion sites on various different dedicated servers.
 These hidden services are all using Tor 0.2.1.30 (which I believe is the
 latest stable release at the time of writing).
 They have been using this tor version for many months without issue.

 Recently myself and others have had spotty results trying to access these
 services.
 I can take 10-20 attempts always getting the error "[Notice] Tried for 120
 seconds to get a connection to [scrubbed]:80. Giving up. (waiting for
 circuit)".
 If I watch the vidalia tor network map when its trying to connect, its
 building and closing circuits like crazy.
 At the time I receive these errors, I am directly connected (no Tor) to
 the hidden service server via SSH and I can see that it is indeed up and
 running, and many people are accessing the site through Tor, but its not
 working for me.

 Usually restarting the Tor process on the client makes it instantly work
 again, but other times it just wont work unless I restart Tor on the
 hidden service server.

 So this appears to be a problem that happens over time, with a long
 running tor process.

 These hidden services are all pretty well known and popular, so its
 possible this is some kind of denial of service attack through the Tor
 protocol, but I suspect it may be a bug in one of the recent Tor beta
 versions that many relays are running, since its only been the last 2-3
 weeks I noticed this problem.

 I am not the only one to have this problem, many of my site visitors are
 reporting the site being "down" during periods I know its up, and I can
 see from access logs that people were accessing it, so it wasn't down for
 everyone.

 Sorry for the vagueness of this report, if there is something I can do to
 get further details please tell me.

 Thanks.

-- 
Ticket URL: <https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/3825>
Tor Bug Tracker & Wiki <https://trac.torproject.org/>
The Tor Project: anonymity online