[mnet-devel] about handling transient network outages

[Zooko O'Whielacronx]

It would be nice if your node remembered the comm strats for peers, even while
those same comm strats are failing due to a transient network error, and tried
them again later.  I don't think that it does, though.  I think that it forgets
all the comm strats when they fail, and tries to lookup new ones, which of
course doesn't work during a network outage.  So I *think* that currently you
don't reconnect to the network after a (sufficiently long) outage until you
manage to load a bootpage and then contact a MT with the contact info from the
bootpage.

Since currently we have only one working MT (mine) and currently of the 7 or so
bootpages probably only 1 or so has my current IP address, this can take a long
time.

Easy suggestion, for v0.6.2: ping the bootpage operators, prune all hardcoded
bootpage URL that point to bootpages that don't contain at least one good MT
contact info, set up several more MTs (like, half-a-dozen would be great), put
the IPs (or better yet DNS names) of those MTs into all the remaining
bootpages.

This should be done anyway to increase the robustness and responsiveness of the
network.

Difficult suggestion, perhaps best for v0.6.3: dig into the Byzantine,
infinitely sophisticated guts of the v0.6 comms code and figure out how to make
it keep old comm strats for later use without allowing those old comm strats to
keep fresh new comm strats out, and without tricking the higher-layer code into
thinking dead nodes are still active.  This *might* be really easy, I don't
know.  There is a concept of "choose between these two comm strategies", and it
is encapsulated into a single method ("CommStrat.choose_best_strategy()"), so 
I *think* if you make that function always choose the newer/better replacement
then you can safely keep the old comm strats around and retry them.

Regards,

Zooko



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