minion pinger

["Joel M. Baldwin" <qumqats@outel.org>]

Time for the Announcement.  I've been running a
Minion pinger since Sat on the grove remailer
and things seem to be working.

<http://outel.org/mix/minion/>

Disclaimer:
This is quickly hacked code derived from cmeclax's
pingstats package.  At the best it is in alpha.
There could be errors in the stats.

Thanks to cmeclax for having written pingstats.

Pings are sent out every 2 hours and recomputed
every 30 minutes.

The pings are sent out using:
mixminion send -t "mbox:minping@grove" -P "$node,grove"

This results in a path of [$node,grove][grove].
Thus a good part of the latency listed on the page
for the remailers is local to grove as the ping message
works its way through the queue twice.

A new Directory is acquired once a day, although I
gather this is redundant since mixminion does this
internally.  As new mixminion remailers are added to
the Directory they should automatically appear in
the ping stats.

TODO:
a. add the Remailer-Capabilities: section.  It should
	list the IP or domain name, the port, and the
	cap (currently only relay, smtp, mbox ).
b. generate chain stats.