Why does directory mirroring get disabled when AccountingMax is on?

Question

I'm the operator of the Tor node strugees. I want to mirror the directory.

Apparently everything is working grand, except for the fact that directory mirroring is disabled due to the fact that I have AccountingMax turned on. Why is this? What are the potential repercussions of turning off AccountingMax?

Here are the relevant sections of my torrc:

17 # Never send or receive more than 10GB of data per week. The accounting
18 # period runs from 10 AM on the 1st day of the week (Monday) to the same
19 # day and time of the next week.
20 AccountingStart week 1 10:00
21 AccountingMax 40 GB
22 BandwidthRate 230KB (235520)
23 BandwidthBurst 550MB (576716800)
24
25 # Mirror the directory
26 DirPort 9030

And here is the relevant section of the logs in ARM:

 08:22:08 [NOTICE] Performing bandwidth self-test...done.
 08:21:44 [NOTICE] Not advertising DirPort (Reason: AccountingMax enabled)
 08:21:44 [NOTICE] Self-testing indicates your DirPort is reachable from the outside. Excellent.
 08:20:48 [NOTICE] Self-testing indicates your ORPort is reachable from the outside. Excellent. Publishing server descriptor.

Answer 1

A directory mirror that has an max accounting set is simply not best practice. So a directory mirror has to be reliable and always on to be useful. Another reason is that if you set an AccountingMax it is much more important to use the limited amount of traffic for incoming client connections than using it for syncing between dirauths and your relay. So it is pretty much "wasted" traffic when mirroring the directory whilst AccountingMax is turned on.

Hope this answer gets the issue more clear to you.

Answer 2

When your Traffic limit is reached tor tries not to generat any Traffic anymore. Directory requests also generate traffic hence aren't advertised either.

(When you reach your account's traffic limit (which usually is why you limit Traffic) you may not be able to administer a relay anymore.)