[tor-relays] How to manually change overloaded Guard?

[Roger Dingledine]

On Thu, Oct 29, 2020 at 05:56:59AM +0000, petrarca at protonmail.ch wrote:
> Since tonight I can't get any usable Tor connections anymore; restarting Tor gives the following error message:
> 
> Guard TOR2DFNrelB ($0ED0EA324C931CF41CB5272BFB1D015B3D5772A9) is failing more circuits than usual. Most likely this means the Tor network is overloaded. Success counts are 152/217. Use counts are 45/59. 167 circuits completed, 13 were unusable, 2 collapsed, and 51 timed out. For reference, your timeout cutoff is 60 seconds.
> 
> Any idea how to change the Guard - just restarting Tor doesn't help?

It is possible that the overloading happened because of the shift in load
from kicking out the bunch of relays tonight -- and if so, it should sort
itself out over the coming days.

It's also possible that your guard is just encountering other problems
in scaling, like it's hitting cpu limits -- Mike's upcoming "scaling
research" project aims to (among other things) get better at detecting
relays that can't handle their current load, and send less user traffic
toward them so they reach equilibrium. But if that's the underlying
reason for your issue, there isn't really a good short-term fix.

You can change (reset) your current guard by going to your state file
(in Tor's DataDirectory) and removing the "Guard" lines. Or heck, it might
just be easier to delete the state file rather than trying to edit it.

In an ideal world messing with your state file would be a thing that
people do rarely if at all, since it can do complex things to your
anonymity. So, do this step with care. :)

--Roger