[tor-dev] Guardiness: Yet another external dirauth script

[Damian Johnson]

>> This should also be possible with the guardiness stuff, as long as you
>> can arrange fresh consensuses to arrive on the second host.
>
> tor supports consensus downloads without being a router, but it's a bit of a
> hack:
>
> A tor instance configured with a DirPort and no ORPort will act as a
> directory cache only.
> Directory caches regularly download the latest consensuses.
>
> It's worth binding the DirPort to localhost only, and marking it
> NoAdvertise.
> This hides the cache from the consensus, and disables remote requests.
>
> However, the cache will also download router descriptors unnecessarily.
> (Microdescriptors and extra info can be turned off, but I'm not sure if
> router descriptors can.)

If all he's after is to fetch the latest consensus or votes then
that's pretty simple (no hack or running a local tor instance
necessary)...

https://stem.torproject.org/tutorials/mirror_mirror_on_the_wall.html#where-can-i-get-the-current-descriptors