[tor-relays] directory servers working on updates?

[Paul Geurts]

hi Roger et al,

thanks for your extensive reply, I appreciate this.
I am a relatively small relay operator with more of an infrastructure
background than a software development background, but nevertheless trying
to understand and learn from the bug reports and follow up. So I am afraid
I can't help you out on details regarding the tor clients that are putting
load on the directory authorities.

kinds regards, Paul





gr. Paul


On Sun, Jun 14, 2020 at 11:58 PM Roger Dingledine <arma at torproject.org>
wrote:

> On Sun, Jun 14, 2020 at 07:27:55PM +0200, Paul Geurts wrote:
> > anything up this weekend?
> >
> > [image: image.png]
>
> Yes. There is a mysterious alternative Tor client out there, which is
> programmed to do uncompressed directory fetches just from the directory
> authorities. It easily overloads directory authorities if they don't use
> the defenses we put in for it over the past few months:
> https://bugs.torproject.org/33018
>
> This alternate set of Tor clients recently came back, and you can see
> its impact in e.g. the bandwidth graph for gabelmoo:
>
> https://metrics.torproject.org/rs.html#details/F2044413DAC2E02E3D6BCF4735A19BCA1DE97281
>
> Now, fortunately, it doesn't ask for directory information in the same
> way as any of the Tors that we've ever built, so the fix in #33018 was
> to keep answering the Tors that we built, while declining to answer
> these other requests when we're low on bandwidth.
>
> But even still, some of the directory authorities are having trouble
> under the load, and the resulting desynchronization means that not every
> directory authority succeeds at participating in every consensus round.
>
> That's probably what you're seeing with the inconsistencies on
> https://consensus-health.torproject.org/
>
> If somebody knows some details of what these other Tor clients actually
> are, that would be really helpful to know!
>
> --Roger
>
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