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Re: accounting vs long lived nodes



David Vennik wrote:
I use tor most often for irc, although I have recently shifted my
customary irc hangout to the ORC away from a little one i used to hang
out at, and on ORC tor proxying is a prerequesite.

As a user of tor with irc, it has become the most common bitch of anyone
i've talked to about the endless process of dying circuits, and while
thinking about it recently i realised there was one thing that could be
built into tor that would reduce the number of mis-guesses of long-lived
tor nodes: accounting!

If a node has bandwidth accounting, it should not be listed as long
lived, because obviously it is likely to go down at any moment. I don't
know if it will make that much difference to persistent session use on
tor or not, but I think that it is only logical that bandwidth
accounting should flag a 'not long lived' flag on the server information
so that circuits to irc and ssh and other long lived connections don't
use it. i know this might 'reduce anonymity' through the weakening of
defenses against traffic analysis, but endless reconnections to irc
servers, in my experience, is annoying both to myself and to the endless
timeouts in the ORC which is exclusively tor-accessible.

Regards,

David Vennik

Doesn't tor already have this? Connections to certain ports (21, 22, 80 among others) that are typically reserved for long-lived connections will avoid nodes that have been up for less than a certain amount of time.