[tor-relays] tor network "loses" ~50 relays/day due to bw auth problem

[Roger Dingledine]

On Tue, May 19, 2015 at 08:47:56PM +0000, nusenu wrote:
> sounds alarming if people operating tor's key infrastructure do not
> care (or have not enough time to care)

Well, we are working on a variety of approaches now for fixing it. Some
in the short term (get more bwauths, fix bugs), some in the long term
(make and deploy better design for computing weights).

> https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-consensus-health/2015-May/005774.html:
> > WARNING: The following directory authorities are not reporting 
> > bandwidth scanner results: tor26
> 
> If one more bw auth goes down, all relays will get the unmeasured
> flag, because the threshold of 3 votes is no longer reached, is that
> understanding of the spec correct?

No, I believe if there are only two dir auths who express weight
opinions in their votes, then the group collectively backs off to using
self-advertised weights.

> current stats:
> 2015-05-19 19:00: 1367 unmeasured
> ("lost" ~1000 relays and 10GBit/s bw since 2015-05-01)

We also took some steps in the past few weeks to cut out extra tiny
relays. It would be good for somebody to track a list of what those
events were.

I don't mean to say that we lost zero relays due to the above issue;
but I think an unknown number of them are better explained by other
events in the network.

--Roger