Tor 0.1.1.13-alpha is out

[Roger Dingledine]

This is the thirteenth development snapshot for the 0.1.1.x series.

It fixes several important crash bugs for servers and clients, as well
as a number of big memory bloating problems. This is the best Tor yet!

http://tor.eff.org/download.html

Changes in version 0.1.1.13-alpha - 2006-02-09
  o Crashes in 0.1.1.x:
    - When you tried to setconf ORPort via the controller, Tor would
      crash. So people using TorCP to become a server were sad.
    - Solve (I hope) the stack-smashing bug that we were seeing on fast
      servers. The problem appears to be something do with OpenSSL's
      random number generation, or how we call it, or something. Let me
      know if the crashes continue.
    - Turn crypto hardware acceleration off by default, until we find
      somebody smart who can test it for us. (It appears to produce
      seg faults in at least some cases.)
    - Fix a rare assert error when we've tried all intro points for
      a hidden service and we try fetching the service descriptor again:
      "Assertion conn->state != AP_CONN_STATE_RENDDESC_WAIT failed"

  o Major fixes:
    - Fix a major load balance bug: we were round-robining in 16 KB
      chunks, and servers with bandwidthrate of 20 KB, while downloading
      a 600 KB directory, would starve their other connections. Now we
      try to be a bit more fair.
    - Dir authorities and mirrors were never expiring the newest
      descriptor for each server, causing memory and directory bloat.
    - Fix memory-bloating and connection-bloating bug on servers: We
      were never closing any connection that had ever had a circuit on
      it, because we were checking conn->n_circuits == 0, yet we had a
      bug that let it go negative.
    - Make Tor work using squid as your http proxy again -- squid
      returns an error if you ask for a URL that's too long, and it uses
      a really generic error message. Plus, many people are behind a
      transparent squid so they don't even realize it.
    - On platforms that don't have getrlimit (like Windows), we were
      artificially constraining ourselves to a max of 1024
      connections. Now just assume that we can handle as many as 15000
      connections. Hopefully this won't cause other problems.
    - Add a new config option ExitPolicyRejectPrivate which defaults to
      1. This means all exit policies will begin with rejecting private
      addresses, unless the server operator explicitly turns it off.

  o Major features:
    - Clients not longer download descriptors for non-running
      descriptors.
    - Before we add new directory authorities, we should make it
      clear that only v1 authorities should receive/publish hidden
      service descriptors.

  o Minor features:
    - As soon as we've fetched some more directory info, immediately
      try to download more server descriptors. This way we don't have
      a 10 second pause during initial bootstrapping.
    - Remove even more loud log messages that the server operator can't
      do anything about.
    - When we're running an obsolete or un-recommended version, make
      the log message more clear about what the problem is and what
      versions *are* still recommended.
    - Provide a more useful warn message when our onion queue gets full:
      the CPU is too slow or the exit policy is too liberal.
    - Don't warn when we receive a 503 from a dirserver/cache -- this
      will pave the way for them being able to refuse if they're busy.
    - When we fail to bind a listener, try to provide a more useful
      log message: e.g., "Is Tor already running?"
    - Adjust tor-spec to parameterize cell and key lengths. Now Ian
      Goldberg can prove things about our handshake protocol more
      easily.
    - MaxConn has been obsolete for a while now. Document the ConnLimit
      config option, which is a *minimum* number of file descriptors
      that must be available else Tor refuses to start.
    - Apply Matt Ghali's --with-syslog-facility patch to ./configure
      if you log to syslog and want something other than LOG_DAEMON.
    - Make dirservers generate a separate "guard" flag to mean,
      "would make a good entry guard". Make clients parse it and vote
      on it. Not used by clients yet.
    - Implement --with-libevent-dir option to ./configure. Also, improve
      search techniques to find libevent, and use those for openssl too.
    - Bump the default bandwidthrate to 3 MB, and burst to 6 MB
    - Only start testing reachability once we've established a
      circuit. This will make startup on dirservers less noisy.
    - Don't try to upload hidden service descriptors until we have
      established a circuit.
    - Fix the controller's "attachstream 0" command to treat conn like
      it just connected, doing address remapping, handling .exit and
      .onion idioms, and so on. Now we're more uniform in making sure
      that the controller hears about new and closing connections.