It seems the current Tor+Privoxy+Vidalia bundle (0.1.2.4-alpha) running on Windows XP does not load server descriptors from cached-routers on start-up.
Steps to reproduce the problem: - Have a relatively fresh copy of cached-routers and cached-status/* stored in the Tor data directory, obtained from another machine that has been successfully running Tor. - For the purpose of this experiment, we set "FetchServerDescriptors 0" and "FetchHidServDescriptors 0" in torrc, so that Tor has to depend solely on the local cache for server descriptors. - Start Tor. - Tor reports, "I learned some more directory information, but not enough to build a circuit." and stops there (since FetchServerDescriptors was set to 0). - Stop Tor. - Rename cached-routers to cached-routers.new - Start Tor again. - Tor reports, "We now have enough directory information to build circuits." and immediately starts building circuits. It looks like Tor ignores cached-routers but reads cached-routers.new if present. This occurs only in Windows. In Linux (also running Tor 0.1.2.4-alpha), both cached-routers and cached-routers.new are loaded on start-up. This would be nice to fix but not terribly urgent, since we can work around it for now by renaming cached-routers to cached-routers.new before starting Tor. Thanks, - John
