[Tor-BSD] This list...

[Linus Nordberg]

George Rosamond <george at ceetonetechnology.com> wrote
Fri, 14 Jun 2013 13:10:37 -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?

>From [dir-spec]:

   "Stable" -- A router is 'Stable' if it is active, and either its Weighted
   MTBF is at least the median for known active routers or its Weighted MTBF
   corresponds to at least 7 days. Routers are never called Stable if they are
   running a version of Tor known to drop circuits stupidly.  (0.1.1.10-alpha
   through 0.1.1.16-rc are stupid this way.)

        To calculate weighted MTBF, compute the weighted mean of the lengths
        of all intervals when the router was observed to be up, weighting
        intervals by $\alpha^n$, where $n$ is the amount of time that has
        passed since the interval ended, and $\alpha$ is chosen so that
        measurements over approximately one month old no longer influence the
        weighted MTBF much.
[...]
   "Guard" -- A router is a possible 'Guard' if its Weighted Fractional
   Uptime is at least the median for "familiar" active routers, and if
   its bandwidth is at least median or at least 250KB/s.

        To calculate weighted fractional uptime, compute the fraction
        of time that the router is up in any given day, weighting so that
        downtime and uptime in the past counts less.

        A node is 'familiar' if 1/8 of all active nodes have appeared more
        recently than it, OR it has been around for a few weeks.


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

Depends on what "ephemeral" means in that sentence I guess.

Moving a bridge around to different addresses and ports will make the
churn of bridges higher. That is a good thing for those trying to find a
bridge that works who are on a network where bridges are being blocked
on destination address and port. Some networks block on traffic
signature though.

[dir-spec] https://gitweb.torproject.org/torspec.git/blob/HEAD:/dir-spec.txt