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

[Scott Bennett]

Toralf F?rster <toralf.foerster at gmx.de> wrote:

> On 1/30/21 5:59 AM, Scott Bennett wrote:
> >       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?
>
> I do wonder if this helps if all authorities suffer from the same 
> issue/architectural fla/DDos/bug ?
>
     Well, at least some of us currently see that a majority of the authorities
*do* suffer from the bug that Roger described.  That bug does seem to provide
some impairment to the performance of the tor network by causing loads to be
distributed based upon faulty information in consensus documents.  The network
is presumably large enough now that such impairment is likely to be difficult
to detect on the larger scales, but is being noticed by individual relay operators
and our observations posted here.
     There was a time when the rule stated was that the different authorities must
run different versions of tor in hopes of avoiding that sort of thing, but of
course, tor versions are still susceptible to including the same bugs in many
versions.  I doubt that there is a perfect solution, but authorities can be
configured with many overrides for standard operating parameters already.  Either
of the modifications that I proposed could well be implemented with a way for the
project to temporarily override it in emergencies that would otherwise leave over
half of the authority relays in a non-voting state simultaneously, for example.
     Also, note that the HSDir flag is withheld until a relay completes a minimum
of 96 hours of uptime.  Does that restriction currently apply to authorities as
well?  If so, then it provides an example of how applying time-dependent limits
to the privileges of authorities should work.


                                  Scott Bennett, Comm. ASMELG, CFIAG
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