[Tor-BSD] This list...

[George Rosamond]

Linus Nordberg:
> George Rosamond <george at ceetonetechnology.com> wrote
> Fri, 14 Jun 2013 10:04:28 -0400:
> 
> | Recreating a fingerprint on boot doesn't matter.
> | 
> | While I don't generally do this on relays, what are the negatives about
> | doing it on relays?  Yes, your fingerprint gets recreated and you lose
> | any "credibility" as a relay.  And it then takes time to become marked
> | stable or a guard.
> 
> Meanwhile clients will not want to use your relay as much as they were
> before you rebooted. IIRC it'll take you a week or two to gain Guard
> f.ex. Pretty bad IMO.

Well that is my question.  I know that you have to re-earn guard and
stable status, but *how* bad is that?

Is there a benefit in "diffusion" with more ephemeral relays?

</thinking aloud and not necessarily clearly>

> 
> 
> | I don't see it necessarily as a big negative.  No, I don't make a habit
> | of putting /var/db/tor on a RAM-based disk for any relay, it does makes
> | sense for devices running off microSD cards, for instance.  The less
> | writes, the better on those.
> 
> It'd be interesting to know the frequency of flash page erases on a
> device with only /var/db/tor on it.
> 

Think about a system like NanoBSD.  The config is on one partition, and
resides on the flash media.  It boots off it and what is most frequently
written only resides in RAM.  There is a reason they built it that way,
and why pfSense and FreeNAS use it for their embedded images.

g