[tor-dev] Accessing hidden services with TAP or ntor

[grarpamp]

> and why users sometimes report that the access to them fails. The

As an anecdote, I seemed to feel a step improvement in HS access
sometime between 1-2 years ago, perhaps in the move to later
0.2.3.x. And that it's very good now.

I think a big user problem was the socks5 timeout issue with firefox
that has since been fixed.

> and found no difference in the behaviour of both Tor versions. Both
> failed on one random HS and opened all other reasonably fast.

I see a few what I would call random failures to prime (from a service known
to be up... reliably fetch the HS desciptor the first time, or build
the path the
first time). I've never really looked into it other than wanting the below
feature to eliminate any browser/socks and that sort of non-tor issue, and
to better script these kinds of tests against hundreds of onions. ie: Answer
these questions in successive individual order...
- can we get a descriptor off the hsdirs, why/not, and print it out in full
- can we rendezvous, build and connect to the far end tor, why/not, and print
- can we get reply from whatever may be listening on HiddenServicePort

> So maybe we need another theory to test. ;)

Would be nice to be able to fetch and print out the HS descriptor from the
controller. I posted/ticketed a rough proposed command operation spec
for that maybe 6mo ago that we had some mutual review/interest/code
on this list. Don't know it's current status... Qingping?

https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/8993
https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/3521