[tor-dev] Load Balancing in 2.7 series - incompatible with OnionBalance ?

[George Kadianakis]

Alec Muffett <alecm at fb.com> writes:

> typo:
>
>> alecm: and this persists for up to 24h, even though the outage was only 10 minutes
>
> Also, I neglected to observe that linear polling of A-E seeking a descriptor suggests A will be hammered whilst J is nearly idle.
>
> Some entropy in IP selection would be a good thing.
>

Please see rend_client_get_random_intro_impl().
Clients will pick a random intro point from the descriptor which seems to be the
proper behavior here.

I can see how a TTL might be useful in high availability scenarios like the one
you described. However, it does seem like something with potential security
implications (like, set TTL to 1 second for all your descriptors, and now you
have your clients keep on making directory circuits to fetch your descs).

For this reason I'd be interested to see this specified in a formal Tor proposal
(or even as a patch to prop224). It shouldn't be too big! :)

Cheers!