[guardian-dev] Tor on Android over Open Garden

[Nathan of Guardian]

On 06/17/2013 10:10 PM, Greg Hazel wrote:
> What do you disable, exactly, to preserve battery? Network calls
> should quickly fail with a host unreachable error - perhaps you could
> use that as a cue to stop activity, and not try again until the user
> generates some sort of traffic? Failing fast based on DisableNetwork
> is no better than failing fast based on host unreachable..
Host unreachable is something happening deep down within Tor, and it is
more complicated than a traditional client-to-server connection. Tor
will continue to try and connect and reconnect as networks go away and
come back (say switching between 3G and wifi). Tor can have many (more
than 10 easily) connections open to different Tor entrance nodes, and
those come and go and change often.

What we do then is put Tor into "airplane mode" when we think that it
should stop trying to reconnect and build circuits, based on what
Android is tell us the state of our internet connection is.

Don't get me wrong - we really want to support Open Garden, but I also
believe our current implementation makes the most sense for most of our
users.

>
> According to Android bug 33666, this occurs for ethernet connections
> as well. Nothing to do with adhoc mesh networking, it's just
> ConnectivityManager bugs.
Okay, we will check into this, and work around the bug.


>
> As long as a WiFi or 3G/4G connection is present, OrbotVPN should work
> fine -- however if OrbotVPN is pushing traffic through Open Garden,
> the same ConnectivityManager issue applies.
>
Understood. We also work with OLSR-based mesh networks, and are seeing
this same issue there, when we establish an adhoc wifi connection at a
lower level than Connection Manager.

Thanks for joining out -dev list and look forward to working this out.

+n

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