users... User-Agent: Mutt/1.5.9i Reply-To: or-talk@freehaven.net On Fri, Sep 02, 2005 at 09:08:27PM -0400, Jeffrey F. Bloss wrote:

What IS the impact on the tor network if a node suddenly drops off the face of the planet, or appears and disappears every half hour or so for an 8 hour span? I'd assume since tor is "real time" the node is simply routed around, correct? How fast are these things compensated for?

Tor servers publish an "uptime" in their server descriptor, which is the time they've been available/working at their current IP. If servers die suddenly, Tor circuits that use them are broken. If somebody is using one of those circuits (e.g. for his irc connection), then it gets cut. Tor clients have a config option "LongLivedPorts" which defaults to "21,22,706,1863,5050,5190,5222,5223,6667,8300,8888". If a socks request asks for one of these ports, then it uses a circuit constructed entirely of nodes with uptimes of at least a day. The theory is that if they've been up that long, they'll probably be up a while longer. So for things like port 80 where the request is typically quite quick, a flaky node is fine, since it's either up during the request or it's not (in which case we'll keep building circuits until we get one that works). The answer to your question is "If your node is always like this, then it's probably not worth while to run a Tor node. But if it's fine for most days and it has this behavior one afternoon a week, then it's useful to have it." Hope that helps, --Roger ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.leitl.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE [demime 1.01d removed an attachment of type application/pgp-signature which had a name of signature.asc]