tor directory servers / tor pki issues

[Roger Dingledine]

On Mon, Sep 23, 2002 at 05:16:43PM -0400, Adam Shostack wrote:
> What's the uptime of a router?  We had routers that flapped, which
> meant that the directory was out of date when you got it, which is
> ugly.  The right fix is high reliability servers, but you also need to
> accept that part of your directory may be out of date.

Well, I think we need to have routers that are unlikely to be gone in
the next hour. Specifically, given that users choose paths with 2 or
more routers, we want the chance that *any* router in the path is down
to be quite low.

Down the road, the directory server can maintain rudimentary statistics
and choose not to list routers which are there but not reliable 'enough'.

I've already fixed the onion proxy so it can distinguish between "you
completed the connection to the webserver and then it closed" from "your
connection closed and it hadn't made it to the exit node yet". In theory
the onion proxy could automatically retry if the onion didn't work;
is this a good idea or a bad idea?

--Roger