[tor-relays] Authority Nodes

[Matt Westfall]

LOL this requirement:  - Should be run by somebody that Tor (i.e. Roger)
knows.

One thing that I think would help Tor a lot and have seen some discussions
on, would be a better 'trustworthy' way to measure bandwidth.  I know it's
measured a couple of different ways now, with 'observed' bandwidth and some
testing/probing from the directory authorities, but as outlined in your
e-mail adding more directory authorities is a tedious process at best, so
is there a way that something could be set up where Tor maintainers could
put a flag manually on a relay to indicate that it can and should, initiate
bandwidth tests and report them back to the actual authorities?

Matt Westfall
President & CIO
ECAN Solutions, Inc.
Everything Computers and Networks
804.592.1672
http://ecansol.com


On Sat, Jun 20, 2020 at 5:59 AM Roger Dingledine <arma at torproject.org>
wrote:

> On Fri, Jun 19, 2020 at 07:10:43AM -0300, Vitor Milagres wrote:
> > I see the Authority Nodes are located only in North America and Europe.
> > I would like to contribute to the TOR network as much as possible. I am
> > currently running a node and I would like to make it an Authority Node as
> > well.
> > I am from Brazil and I believe it would possibly be a good idea to have a
> > new Authority Node in South America.
> > What are the requirements? What should I do to become one of them?
> > FYI, the node I am running is 79DFB0E1D79D1306AF03A4B094C55A576989ABD1
>
> Thanks for your interest in running a directory authority! Long ago we
> wrote up a set of goals for new directory authorities:
> https://gitweb.torproject.org/torspec.git/tree/attic/authority-policy.txt
>
> It is definitely an informal policy at this point, but it still gets
> across some of the requirements.
>
> If you're able to run an exit relay at your location, that's definitely
> more useful than another directory authority at this point.
>
> Also, because we haven't automated some steps, each new directory
> authority that we add means additional coordination complexity, especially
> when we identify misbehaving relays and need to bump them out of the
> network quickly.
>
> Here are two big changes since that document:
>
> (1) The directory authorities periodically find themselves needing to
> scale to quite large bandwidths -- sustaining 200mbit at a minimum,
> and being able to burst to 400mbit or 500mbit, is pretty much needed at
> this point:
> https://bugs.torproject.org/33018
>
> (2) Tor ships with hundreds of hard-coded relays called Fallback
> Directories, which distribute the load for bootstrapping into the Tor
> network, and which also provide alternate access points if the main
> directory authorities are blocked.
> https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/doc/FallbackDirectoryMirrors
> So while the directory authorities are still a trust bottleneck,
> they are less of a performance bottleneck than they used to be.
>
> In summary: if you want to run a directory authority, your next step
> is to join the Tor community, get to know us and get us to know you,
> come to one of the dev meetings (once the world is able to travel
> again), and see where things go from there.
>
> Thanks,
> --Roger
>
> _______________________________________________
> tor-relays mailing list
> tor-relays at lists.torproject.org
> https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-relays
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-relays/attachments/20200706/ecaee435/attachment.htm>