[tor-onions] Onion self healing / republish

[Péter Szilágyi]

Hey all,

I'm sorry if this is something obvious, I've searched for a day and
couldn't find satisfactory information. Feel free to point me to relevant
resources if I missed them.

So, I'd like to run Tor in a P2P setting on mobile phones (
https://github.com/coronanet). In general, everything works as expected. My
issues are with the fine grained behaviors of the Tor proxy wrt onion
addresses and network connectivity.

As long as I allow a stable internet connection to Tor, everything's fine.
What I wanted to check is how Tor behaves if I start pulling the rug from
underneath it in various states.

I've tried keeping Tor offline (network disabled), publish an onion into
the service and then enable networking afterwards (SETCONF DisableNetwork
0). This also seems to work, when Tor goes online it publishes the onion
that was added offline and I can access it (at least sending a HEARTBEAT
signal reports "1 v3 INTRODUCE2 cells and attempted to launch 1 rendezvous
circuits"). So far so good.

Now comes the more interesting test: while networking is enabled and
seemingly everything works, I cut off network access at the router level
(i.e. simulate a phone losing WiFi signal / turning off data). Similar to
my previous test, I've created a new onion in this scenario too, then
reenabled WiFI. Unfortunately, whilst my first onion comes back online, the
second one is lost in some black hole. My guess is that Tor **thinks** it's
online, fails to register it, then some internal state gets messed up.

If I try to list the current onions (GETINFO onions/current), both appear.
If I try to list some infos about them via `GETINFO hs/service/desc/id/`,
both look the same, reporting their own crypto keys. However, only the
first one response, the second never gets router, neither noticed by the
local Tor instance.

At this point I'd be perfectly happy is this weird scenario was "not meant
to work by design", as long as Tor could explicitly tell me somehow that
"sorry, onion X is dead, sort it out yourself". I'd be even happier if this
worked though. Maybe this is a bug that was fixed in a later version? I'm
on 0.3.5.10.

Thanks,
  Peter
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