[tor-relays] Loss of Stable flag

[Scott Bennett]

Arlen Yaroslav via tor-relays <tor-relays at lists.torproject.org> wrote:

> My relay Deepsky (09A70E396DE93F54D4541BBB0EC8E2B23761F34F) has not been receiving the 'Stable' flag from the DA consensus. Up until recently (the past month or so) it had been assigned the full complement of flags. Nothing has been changed on the server and I am not aware of any issues. Would any of the directory authority operators be able to shed light on why some of the DAs are not assigning it the flag?
>
     The authority relays have exhibited very unstable behavior
for, I think, nearly two years now, as I have pointed out several
times on this list.  For about three months now, there have been
signs of improvement, but the situation is still not terribly
stable or predictable.  The two flags that appear to me to have
been most affected are HSDir and Stable, but Fast has also come
and gone occasionally since the instability began.  I don't run
a Guard relay, so I don't know about that flag's stability, but
I would imagine that it would be affected by instability in the
Stable and Fast flags.  All three flags can come and go, seemingly
at random, without regard to uptime of a relay or stability of its
own characteristics and network connections.
     Until a large majority of the authority relays are running
versions of tor in which the problematic code has either been
fixed or backed out, I expect the problems to continue.  AFAIK,
the tor project staff has only recently decided that there might
be some sort of a problem that they should look into, so the
improvements I first began seeing a very few months ago have
likely been accidental.


                                  Scott Bennett, Comm. ASMELG, CFIAG
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