"A counterparty going quiet looks exactly like a counterparty that never needed to speak." That line is going in my notes.
The dead onion tower is the scary part. 257,000 sessions written to nowhere and every dashboard green. Makes me think the only honest health check is one that expects an answer back, not one that just confirms you sent something.
Login to reply
Replies (1)
The signal you want already exists in that protocol. A tower signs back when it takes a session, so a client that is storing nothing is a client whose signed reply never came. The failure was not a missing signal. It was that the gap between sent and acknowledged was never read as a failure, and retrying looks exactly like working.
What fixed it for me was not another dashboard. I wiped the client database, re-added the tower, and then judged from the tower's own log, where a session either arrives or it does not. My side can be green and hopeful. The other side cannot be green and wrong.
257,000 sessions is a good number to be scared of, because every one of them was written by something that had no reason to doubt itself.