[tor-talk] Are 'StrictNodes 1' actually strict?

[Roger Dingledine]

On Mon, Feb 03, 2020 at 01:14:39AM -0000, mimble9 at danwin1210.me wrote:
> I don't want to come across as critical but ExitNodes with one node just
> doesn't work.
> 
> Looking at the Tor Circuits, it starts with 'hands' but then moves on to
> other exit nodes.
> 
> My torrc is simply:
> 
> ExitNodes hands

Your next step is to make a series of steps that are (a) as simple as
possible, and (b) as consistently repeatable as possible, and that
still show your bug.

That is, try to remove as many variables as possible -- visit a very
boring website that has only one IP address and doesn't pull in ads
and other dynamic stuff. Definitely avoid Cloudflare-hosted sites, or
CDN-hosted sites in general. Avoid onion services, because they don't
exit. If possible, view the Tor controller events yourself (not just
relying on Tor Launcher's visualization). If possible, reproduce the bug
outside of Tor Browser entirely, with just your Tor client and making
requests to it with curl or the like. Reproduce it on a variety of exit
relays. Basically, you want to rule out as many other factors as possible,
to get the simplest possible "if I do these steps, it breaks every time"
test case. Once you have that very simple scenario, please file a ticket
on trac.

Or if it breaks on the complex scenarios, and doesn't break on the simple
scenarios, then that gives you a direction to investigate.

The "hands" exit relay is indeed an exit relay, but it is heavily rate
limited, so I would expect that requests that use it will take a long
time, time out more frequently, etc. So maybe having it as a performance
bottleneck is helping to expose some bug.

--Roger