From the course: Tor and the Dark Web: Exploring the Basics

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Directory servers

Directory servers - Tor Browser Tutorial

From the course: Tor and the Dark Web: Exploring the Basics

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Directory servers

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- [Instructor] Directory servers play a crucial role in the Tor network. They serve as the central location for storing the identity of the nodes on the Tor network. The identities of these directory servers are hard-coded into the Tor browser, and there are only a small handful of them around the world. Here is the current list of Tor directory servers that were live when I filmed this course. As you can see, there are only 10 of them, and they're distributed around the world, with varying levels of bandwidth available to support Tor operations. The sole purpose of directory servers is to maintain information on the status of each node on the Tor network. The directory servers track when nodes appear and disappear, helping to ensure that the network adds new nodes promptly, and quickly drops unhealthy nodes from the network. This work is vital to maintaining the stability of the Tor network, as an unhealthy node can quickly disrupt communications for a large number of users. When you…

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