Re: Uptime Sanity Checking

[Damon Liwanu Mc Coy <Damon.Mccoy@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Yes this is a band-aid fix, and a better fix would be as Nick said to have the directory servers ignore uptime and track stability.

Some of the issues with having the directory servers do this are: (1)  A set of rules as to how they measure stability needs to be thought up. (2) The directory servers would need to retain more state, so that when they are restarted they would remember all the past stability information. (3) If a new authoritative directory server is added how would they integrate into the network? (4) If the directory servers became grossly out of sync could the clients handle this?

Damon

>Date: Fri, 9 Mar 2007 00:12:00 -0500
>From: Nick Mathewson
>
>
>Really, though, this is a band-aid, and we don't want to make it too
>sophisticated.  Remember that 'uptime' is a bad proxy for the property
>we want the 'Stable' flag to measure.  Mean time between failures
>would approximate stability better, I think.  Directory authorities
>already track whether routers seem to be running; if they can remember
>_how long_ they've believed each router to be running, and how long it
>was running before that, we can stop having the directory authorities
>look at uptime at all.
>
>The coding would be marginally harder for that approach, but hardly
>prohibitive.
>
>yrs,
>-- 
>Nick Mathewson
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