[tor-relays] relay uptime and stable flag

Karsten Loesing karsten.loesing at gmx.net
Fri Aug 19 09:52:20 UTC 2011


Hi Sambuddho,

On 8/13/11 12:11 AM, Sambuddho Chakravarty wrote:
>  I see some relays with uptimes over 100 days (eg. Pandora14), but they
> don't have the stable flag enabled ... In the FAQ page it says that relays
> are marked stable when they are running for more than a day, however in the
> directory service page I see relays which are running for more than 200 days
> but not marked stable and some which are running for about 3 hours already
> have the stable flag. Why is there this difference ?

Well, the general answer is that the Stable flag is based on a relay's
uptime history, not on the relay's current uptime.  dir-spec.txt says:

   "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.)

So, if a relay had a really good uptime history, went offline, and came
back online 3 hours ago, it can still have the Stable flag.

But I admit that it seems unlikely that a relay with 100 or 200 days
current uptime has an uptime history that doesn't justify the Stable flag.

If you look up the various votes for these relays, you'll see that the
directory authorities have different opinions here:

  https://metrics.torproject.org/consensus-health.html

I asked Jake who runs Pandora14 why it doesn't have the Stable flag.
But we didn't come up with an easy answer.  It could be a bug.

Do you want to help find the bug?  What other relays did you find that
should have the Stable flag?

Once we have enough information about the bug we should open a ticket:

  https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor

Thanks,
Karsten


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