Re: Suspicious Circuits

[Karsten Loesing <karsten.loesing@xxxxxxx>]

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Roger Dingledine wrote:
> On Sun, Dec 09, 2007 at 09:19:53PM -0800, Kyle Williams wrote:
>> I've been having problems getting to hidden services the last couple of
>> days.
>> I noticed something odd in Vidalia the other day, but it was gone before I
>> could take a screenshot.
>> However this evening, I was having a lot of problems with .onion addresses,
>> and Vidalia was showing several (more than 6) nodes in a circuit almost
>> every time I tried to reach any hidden service, including my own.
> 
> Exciting. Looks like a bug of some sort.

No, I don't think it's a bug.

- From the log file that you, Kyle, gave me yesterday I can see that you
started Tor at 16:04:51 which established introduction points at
"Slowpoke", "dpujtk", and "server" and published a descriptor for your
service at 16:05:27. The delay of 36 seconds comes from the fact that
Tor waits at least 30 seconds for a descriptor to be stable before
publishing it. Then you made a connection attempt at 16:06:26 which
succeeded at 16:06:53 and another attempt at 16:07:00 succeeding at
16:07:02. Everything fine so far.

Subsequently, at 16:07:12 you restarted Tor and made it establish new
introduction points at "otherator2", "crelm", "bytebutlerfive" and
publish a new descriptor containing these introduction points at
16:07:53. Again, the delay of 41 seconds is intentional. But---and this
is the problem---when accessing your service at 16:07:25, Tor downloaded
the first descriptor without being able to know that it's obsolete. So,
Tor tried to connect to "Slowpoke" and the other introduction points
which were not acting as introduction points for your service any more.
That's why you get those NAKs which lead to re-extending the failed
introduction circuits which is also normal behavior.

Hence, there is not a problem in the Tor code.

In general, when performing tests, you should give Tor a little bit more
time to stabilize, especially for hidden services. You should also
consider not to run both server and client on the same Tor instance.

If the problem persists even when waiting for some more time, please report!

Timing is everything! :)
- --Karsten
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