Historical netdoc Items and directory behaviours

Historical Server Descriptor Items

These items once appeared in server descriptors

Items are listed in approximate reverse order of withdrawal, oldest last.

`protocols`

   "protocols" SP "Link" SP LINK-VERSION-LIST SP "Circuit" SP
          CIRCUIT-VERSION-LIST NL

       [At most once.]

An obsolete list of protocol versions, superseded by the “proto” entry. This list was never parsed, and has not been emitted since Tor 0.2.9.4-alpha. New code should neither generate nor parse this line.

`read-history`, `write-history`

    "read-history" DateWsTime (NSEC s) NUM,NUM,NUM,NUM,NUM... NL
        [At most once]
    "write-history" DateWsTime (NSEC s) NUM,NUM,NUM,NUM,NUM... NL
        [At most once]

(These fields once appeared in router descriptors, but have appeared in extra-info descriptors since 0.2.0.x.)

`eventdns` — Declare support for non-obsolete DNS logic

“eventdns” bool NL

[At most once]

Declare whether this version of Tor is using the newer enhanced dns logic. Versions of Tor with this field set to false SHOULD NOT be used for reverse hostname lookups.

This option is obsolete. All Tor current relays should be presumed to have the evdns backend.

Historical consensus method information

See also Computing a consensus which contains much historical material that we have not yet moved here.

As of 0.4.3.1-alpha, authorities no longer advertise or negotiate any consensus methods lower than 28.

As of 0.3.4.1-alpha, authorities no longer advertise or negotiate any consensus methods lower than 25.

As of 0.2.8.2-alpha, authorities no longer advertise or negotiate consensus method 21, because it contains bugs.

Consensus methods 21 and earlier:

A routerstatus entry is included in the result if some router status entry with the same identity is included by more than half of the authorities (total authorities, not just those whose votes we have). (Consensus method earlier than 21)

As of 0.2.6.1-alpha, authorities no longer advertise or negotiate any consensus methods lower than 13.

Inferring missing proto lines

Once upon a time, when a routerdesc is missing a proto item it would be inferred (for the purposes of the routerstatus pr item) as follows:

Versions of Tor 0.2.7.stable and later were assumed to support these capabilities:

Cons=1-2 Desc=1-2 DirCache=1 HSDir=1 HSIntro=3 HSRend=1-2 Link=1-4 LinkAuth=1 Microdesc=1-2 Relay=1-2

Versions at least as recent as 0.2.4.19, but earlier than 0.2.7.stable were assumed to support these capabilities:

Cons=1 Desc=1 DirCache=1 HSDir=1 HSIntro=3 HSRend=1-2 Link=1-4 LinkAuth=1 Microdesc=1 Relay=1-2

Tor Specifications