[tor-dev] Proposal 328: Make Relays Report When They Are Overloaded

[Nick Mathewson]

On Wed, Dec 9, 2020 at 10:10 AM David Goulet <dgoulet at torproject.org> wrote:
>
> On 07 Dec (15:36:53), Ian Goldberg wrote:
> > On Mon, Dec 07, 2020 at 03:06:43PM -0500, David Goulet wrote:
> > > Greetings,
> > >
> > > Attached is a proposal from Mike Perry and I. Merge requsest is here:
> > >
> > > https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/core/torspec/-/merge_requests/22
> > >
> > > Cheers!
> > > David
> >
> > Nice!
> >
> > Is there a way to distinguish "not overloaded" from "does not support
> > this extension"?  (Ideally in a better way than checking the tor release
> > version number and inferring when support was added?)
>
> Gooood point.
>
> So in theory, we have protocol version[1] in order to differentiate relays but
> I do not believe such a change would be a wise thing to use a new "Desc="
> since tor will just ignore the unknown fields.
>
> The other reason for that is that "tor functionalities" as in to function
> properly won't depend on that descriptor field so it is a bit a stretch to
> justify this as a new protocol version :S ...
>
> So yeah, either one looks at the tor version or "you don't see it, not
> overloaded" which is ofc a lie until the entire network migrates. We expect
> our sbws (bandwidth scanner tool) to be the main customer for this.

We could add a new element to this proposal, something like "I will
tell you about overload information", or "I am not overloaded" or
something like that?

peace,
-- 
Nick