[tor-relays] Is my relay broken? No stable, hsdir or guard flags

[Scott Bennett]

Roger Dingledine <arma at torproject.org> wrote:

> On Fri, Jan 29, 2021 at 11:32:44AM +0100, raltullou at posteo.org wrote:
> > - At the beginning of January the relay seems to have lost the guard flag
> > - A week ago I checked and noticed that the relay had also lost the stable
> > flag despite having an uptime of >2 months at that point
> > - A week ago I rebooted the server but the situations hasn't changed - flags
> > are still gone
>
> Some of the directory authorities have restarted many times in the past
> week, and each restart impacts their view of whether other relays are
> stable. In theory it should impact all the views equally (it's like
> there was a blip in the matrix but it was an equal blip for everybody),
> but in practice, maybe the math doesn't make it actually equal.

     IOW, authority relays should not receive an Authority flag until they have
sufficient uptime to judge correctly?  Say, ten days or more?
>
> > - metrics.torproject graphs show that the server has been transmitting data
> > the entire time - so it doesn't seem like I missed some downtime
>
> The graphs on relay-search are visualizing data that is self-reported by
> the relay. So from the relay's perspective there was no downtime, but
> that doesn't give us much hint about whether the directory authorities
> found the relay consistently reachable.
>
> Another hint I find useful is to look at the individual votes from
> the directory authorities. One way to do that is to go to the bottom of
> https://consensus-health.torproject.org/#relayinfo and put in your
> nickname.

     Or, as an alternative to the above proposal, newly awakened authorities'
votes regarding time-dependent flags should be ignored by other authorities
until the newly awakened have been awake at least, say, ten days?  That would
seem a minimum time appropriate for them to give valid judgments on the matter
of time-dependent flags.
>
> > - Serverlogs show no problems
> > - Relay has been running continuously for almost 4 years and only gets
> > rebooted for kernel/tor upgrades -> so uptime and MTBF should not be a
> > problem
> > 
> > Is there a problem on my side?
> > Is there anything I can do or check?
>
> One part that I would look into more is the IPv6 connectivity. Maybe
> that address is intermittent? If it is, then the relay would mostly
> continue to work as normal (because clients mostly use IPv4), but the
> subset of the dir auths that checks IPv6 reachability would consider
> that instability to be a short downtime.

     Until IPv6 addresses are used by other relays to forward traffic, this
seems a totally inappropriate criterion for determining reachability.
>
> > It is a fallback relay - is it still useful as such?
>
> It is still useful yes.
>
     Well, at least there is that, thank goodness.  And at least I finally
have a plausible explanation for the authorities' seemingly bizarre behavior
over the past many moons in which they appear to be awarding, then withholding,
then awarding, then withholding various flags, including HSDir, Stable, and
even Fast, at random when my relay has been up and unfiddled with the whole time
from what I have been able to see, and without any apparent rhyme or reason.  I
had given up trying to figure out what the authorities were doing, much less why,
and therefore had stopped giving a dam about it.
     That situation, in combination with the involvement in the tor project of
very vocal persons lacking apparent comprehension of the basic relationships
between hardware, firmware, supervisory (i.e., privileged) software, and
application software w.r.t. security matters, led me to stop providing a relay
for about a year.  I finally decided to return it to service, but have mostly
stopped reading the overly chatty tor-relays list and any worry over additional
security issues w.r.t. tor.  I take care of my relay the best I know how with
one exception on the authority of Roger Dingledine and leave it at that.
Because I don't like accepting such things on authority, rather than proof or at
least damned good evidence and reason, I mostly stopped caring, which is a real
drag because I once was convinced that tor was a truly good effort to provide
what should have been designed into the Internet in the first place.
Unfortunately, there appear to be still no viable alternatives available.


                                  Scott Bennett, Comm. ASMELG, CFIAG
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