Re: magic Wednesday

[Olaf Selke <olaf.selke@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Roger Dingledine wrote:
> 
> Is blutmagie running weasel's Tor deb, by any chance?

is this the Debian Etch/Sid Tor package? Yes, I originally installed it
and am still using the init.d startup file as well as the log rotation
config. But the Tor binary has been replaced by locally compiled
tarballs downloaded from tor.eff.org.

> Here's the answer:
> 
> [...]
>
> So what's happening is that on the first morning at 6am, your Tor server
> is getting a hup signal, which causes it to publish a new descriptor
> and reset its "18 hour" counter -- meaning it won't publish again until
> 6+18=midnight. So now it's in a cycle where it tries to publish twice
> a day: once at midnight, and once at 6am.
> 
> But the authorities discard the next 6am descriptor, because nothing
> important has changed. And the midnight descriptor expires around 8pm,
> meaning there's a 4-hour gap before you publish again.
> [...]
> (Oh, and the magic Wednesday? Your Tor server generates a new onion
> key every 7 days -- the new onion key produced a descriptor that the
> authorities accepted, so there was no gap on that day.)

you're the man, that's an excellent explanation! I've just changed in
/etc/logrotate.d/tor the keyword daily into monthly to avoid the 6am
SIGHUP. Let's see what happens to Magic Wednesday ...

regards, Olaf