[tor-relays] Help With Autoupdating Tor Software

[teor]

> On 2 May 2018, at 18:32, Iain Learmonth <irl at torproject.org> wrote:
> 
>> On 02/05/18 02:09, Keifer Bly wrote:
>> My suspicion is that my posted uptime was retained because I did not
>> restart the relay software while my router firmware was updating (it was
>> offline for about 2 hours), but it thought I’d share this little thing I
>> noticed.
> 
> You're correct. The uptime that is shown in relay search is calculated
> from your relay's self-reported last restart time. This means that if
> your relay has not restarted, it will have the same last restart time
> when it rejoins the consensus and your uptime will not start back from zero.
> 
> Downtime on relay search is calculated from the time that the relay was
> last seen in a consensus, so this would start from zero at the first
> consensus that does not include your relay (and so also only has a
> resolution of one hour, whereas your last restart time has a resolution
> of one second).
> 
> Onionoo (the relay search backend) does keep track of the fractional
> time a relay was included in the consensus for a given time period in
> the "relay uptime documents":
> 
>  https://metrics.torproject.org/onionoo.html#uptime
> 
> This could be confusing, as now we have two definitions for uptime: 1)
> the relay was running and may or may not have been in the consensus, or
> 2) the relay was in the consensus. Maybe we should fix the ambiguity.

Being in the consensus is called "Running", but what it actually means is
that a majority of directory authorities found your relay reachable.

So perhaps we could use:
* uptime for the amount of time since the tor process started
* reachable time for the amount of time the relay has been online and
  available to clients

T