I have had to turn off the feature “prioritize onion sites when available” because it will rapidly switch to whonix’s constantly down .onion address. Or maybe this is related to the previous issue of whonix not loading certain onions…can whonix not load its own onion address? lol
You clearly have some problem in your configuration because nobody else is reporting or experiencing the Whonix v3 onion being down i.e. forums or main wiki.
When that happened in the past i.e. onion version of the site went down, there were plenty of notifications about it on the “clearnet” version. To date, you’re the only one.
Ditto your other reported issue about being unable to access certain .onions via Whonix. I’ve never seen that issue and I have used Tor via Whonix for many years.
It is highly likely this is an issue specific your configuration/installation only.
The easiest solution is probably just to reinstall Whonix. A new set of entry guards in that case will also probably help.
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Not convinced this is an issue cause on whonix.org server side. Not enough data to claim there is something wrong with whonix.org onion.
- Website and Server Tests somewhat applies.
- Specifically Website and Server Tests
- Also Onion Services - Whonix
- And on infrastructure generally: Placing Trust in Whonix ™
Needs to be put into the right context by comparing with other onions, with a somewhat systematic method.
There’s monitoring in place for whonix.org onion. I was also wondering why it’s down sometimes. However, before looking hard what whonix.org does wrong, it’s important to compare with other organizations with a lot more funding and probably dedicated webmaster / sysadmin full time staff.
For comparison, I’ve also set up automated monitoring for duckduckgo and Tor Project onion. Using a dedicated Tor client not used for anything else. There were approximately unreachable as often as whonix.org onion (dedicated Tor process) as well as even an unpublished onion for these testing purposes. (also a dedicated Tor process). Often not even restarting either Tor process helps.
Testing / presentation isn’t clean enough for publication. And I cannot run such a project on the side.
Someone please start a onion reachability monitoring project / comparison / research / improve Tor.
Whonix is a software project. Not a web application project.
Running a high traffic and/or DDOS resistant onion is certainly a non-trivial task. Even if there was an issue, even if it could be fixed by using onionbalance, having multiple servers, I am not sure it would be worth the effort required (which takes away development work form other taks). Priority discussion, Bug Reports, Software Development and Feature Requests applies.