On Sun, Apr 20, 2008 at 05:41:57PM +0200, Dominik Schaefer wrote: > I think, any routers with uptimes less then 4-6 hours will be more or > less useless for the network and rather tend to produce more traffic > for distributing the router descriptor than relay for clients.
Well, in theory the "client-exit" nodes don't need to send their descriptors to any users. They just need to have an association with a Tor relay so the relay learns quickly when they're available. Then the relay can advertise itself with the exit policy of the client-exit node, and so long as it has some client-exits available whenever an exit request shows up, it can pass it on. Here are a few other things that would be useful to consider before we can evaluate the idea: - Bug 98. If you run too many connections through a Tor process on Windows, the OS will crash. We (meaning Nick) are slowly working on that, but it is not yet solved. - Robert Hogan's questions in this thread are good to look at. In particular, does the relay actually advertise the client-exit's exit policy as its own? - Need to consider load balancing. Right now users will choose the relay proportional to the bandwidth it advertises. But if it's a fast relay and the client-exit node is slow, the client-exit node will get overloaded and things will be even slower than they are now. - Related to load balancing: how much additional latency are we talking about, from adding a fourth hop to the circuit? Because it would seem that you need four hops, since the "relay to client-exit" hop isn't adding much additional anonymity. (Or is it?) - How is the crypto going to work between the relay node and the client-exit node? Are you planning to put a Tor process on the client-exit node, or were you just hoping to put a tiny proxy on it? Probably there are more issues to explore after these. Hope that helps, --Roger
