Tests if addresses are online or offline by briefly connecting to them. These short lived connections are referred to as feeler connections. Feeler connections are designed to increase the number of fresh online addresses in tried by selecting and connecting to addresses in new. One feeler connection is attempted on average once every two minutes.
This change was suggested as Countermeasure 4 in
Eclipse Attacks on Bitcoin’s Peer-to-Peer Network, Ethan Heilman,
Alison Kendler, Aviv Zohar, Sharon Goldberg. ePrint Archive Report
2015/263. March 2015.
* Only store and connect to NODE_NETWORK nodes
* Keep addrman's nService bits consistent with outbound observations
* Verify that outbound connections have expected services
* Don't require services in -addnode
* Introduce enum ServiceFlags for service flags
* Introduce REQUIRED_SERVICES constant
* CAddrDB modified so that when de-serialization code throws an exception Addrman is reset to a clean state
* CAddrDB modified to make unit tests possible
* Regression test created to ensure bug is fixed
* StartNode modifed to clear adrman if CAddrDB::Read returns an error code.
