Using POSTDESCRIPTOR command

[Seth David Schoen]

Roger Dingledine writes:

> Not currently. Tor looks at the networkstatus consensus to decide which
> relays are Running or otherwise suitable for circuits. Your descriptor
> isn't listed there, so Tor doesn't consider using it.
> 
> If somebody were to write a patch to implement a +POSTNS
> instruction (using a format like a networkstatus stanza in your
> ~/.tor/cached-consensus file), I think that would be good.
> 
> Doing it right would be tricky though -- for example, it wouldn't get
> cached anywhere, and Tor would discard it every time it gets a new
> networkstatus consensus (and finds that it's missing any mention of
> your descriptor).

Maybe you could have a ~/.tor/extra-consensus or ~/.tor/local-consensus
which is a parallel cache of network status from nonpublic sources but
that doesn't get overwritten by the regular public consensus.  There's
still an interesting problem of determining the validity of the
descriptors mentioned there if there's no regular source of update of
that information.

-- 
Seth Schoen
Staff Technologist                                schoen at eff.org
Electronic Frontier Foundation                    http://www.eff.org/
454 Shotwell Street, San Francisco, CA  94110     1 415 436 9333 x107