[tor-dev] Counting HS descriptor uploads

[Holmes Wilson]

Knowing when an onion service is likely to be reachable would be useful for
us too, as would less variation in the time required to connect to an onion
address, or a clearer sense of progress when making a connection that we
could relay to the user.

Holmes

On Tue, Aug 9, 2022, 9:01 AM David Goulet <dgoulet at torproject.org> wrote:

> On 28 Jun (13:27:03), Michael Rogers wrote:
> > Hi,
>
> Better late than never I guess :S...
>
> >
> > The Briar team is working on a new app that uses Tor hidden services, and
> > we're trying to work out when the server publishing a hidden service
> should
> > consider the service to be reachable by clients.
> >
> > We've tried counting HS descriptor uploads via control port events, but
> we
> > found that when republishing a hidden service that has been published
> > before, the number of descriptor uploads seems to vary.
> >
> > When republishing a hidden service, is it guaranteed that at least one
> copy
> > of the descriptor will be uploaded? Or are there circumstances where Tor
> > might decide that enough copies were previously uploaded, and still
> contain
> > up-to-date information about introduction points etc, so no new copies
> need
> > to be uploaded?
>
> Descriptor upload can be quite chaotic and unpredictable. Reason is that
> there
> are various cases that can make a service regenerate the descriptors and
> thus
> republish them.
>
> But, in all these cases, the descriptor will change as in for the "version"
> but might not change the intro points information for instance. Such case
> would be that the HSDir hashring changed and the service noticed so it
> would
> immediately upload the existing descriptor(s).
>
> Sometimes, 1 introduction points disappears and so a new one is picked up
> and
> a re-upload is done.
>
> And on and on, there are really various cases that can change it.
>
> Not sure I'm fully answering the question but if not, let me know.
>
> Cheers!
> David
>
> --
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