[tor-bugs] #3023 [Tor Directory Authority]: Tor directory authorities should not act as regular relays/hsdirs

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#3023: Tor directory authorities should not act as regular relays/hsdirs
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 Reporter:  Sebastian                |          Owner:                    
     Type:  defect                   |         Status:  new               
 Priority:  normal                   |      Milestone:  Tor: 0.2.3.x-final
Component:  Tor Directory Authority  |        Version:                    
 Keywords:                           |         Parent:                    
   Points:                           |   Actualpoints:                    
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Comment(by Sebastian):

 We're seeing more problems with dirauths that don't have enough capacity,
 because they're also popular relays. I feel that we should make sure
 dirauths aren't used as relays at all, so that bootstrapping clients,
 consensus generation and reachability testing always take precedence.

 arma argues that this is bad, because dirauths provide more bandwidth to
 the network and more bandwidth is always good. I'm not sure that I'd agree
 with that, tho; because bootstrapping and consensus generation should take
 precedence.

 Another argument is that private networks might be harder to bootstrap and
 use if dirauths can't be relays; but we could just make a flag to change
 that behaviour for private networks - or declare you need to run relays. I
 think even the latter wouldn't be a big constraint, setting up a private
 network is trivial due to chutney and even my privnet hacks, and throwing
 in a few relays doesn't hurt anything.

 I'm listing problems that we've seen on dirauths and that I can remember
 offhand:

 up until a year ago or so, dannenberg was extremely flaky because it
 didn't have enough bandwidth.
 maatuska, dizum and gabelmoo were/are configured without a low enough
 MaxAdvertisedBandwidthRate, so that they often max out their
 RelayBandwidthRate. This causes problems to bootstrapping clients, and
 also during consensus generation.
 tor26 is frequently hitting extremely high memory usage, not having to
 handle relay traffic might help

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Ticket URL: <https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/3023#comment:3>
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