Re: tor directory servers / tor pki issues

[Roger Dingledine <arma@mit.edu>]

On Mon, Sep 23, 2002 at 05:13:21PM -0400, Roger Dingledine wrote:
> A subset of the routers (those which are most static and most trusted)
> will also be directory servers. Proxies connect to them and pull down
> a directory: a list of active routers and their info. They use that
> directory to choose nodes for onions.

Directory servers are in and working.

I'm running three directory servers on moria. They serve directories
via rudimentary http: load http://moria.mit.edu:9031/ to see it in action.

Directory servers rebuild their directory every 10 minutes; onion proxies,
and onion routers which are not directory servers, fetch a new one every
60 minutes. (These are configurable in the rc file, of course.) When you
want to add a new router to the system, you must get all the directory
servers to add it. (You can hup a directory server and it will reread
its router file; hupping the others gets them to fetch a new directory.)

Mozilla can now talk to the onion proxy directly, via socks4. (This
means that Mozilla is still doing the dns resolution. I'm working
with the Mozilla socks maintainer to add support for socks4a and
socks5-using-fqdn-rather-than-ip.) If this works out, it means we support
rather a number of protocols, via Mozilla.

--Roger