[tor-dev] Damian's Status Report - August 2013

[Damian Johnson <atagar@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi all, after a month of work I'm pleased to announce that the Stem based
replacement for Doctor is now live!

  https://gitweb.torproject.org/doctor.git
  https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-consensus-health/2013-September/

For those who aren't familiar with it, Doctor is a service that pulls hourly
consensus information and checks it for a host of issues (directory authority
outages, expiring certificates, etc). In the case of a problem it notifies
tor-consensus-health@, and we in turn give the authority operator a heads up.

The new version of Doctor replaces Karsten's java based counterpart and is
part of our ongoing scheme to eventually deprecate Metrics-lib in favor of
Stem...

https://trac.torproject.org/8252


Other news this month includes...

* Arlo Breault added DNSEL exit list parsing to Stem!

  https://stem.torproject.org/api/descriptor/tordnsel.html
  https://trac.torproject.org/8255

* Stem now mirrors Tor's hardcoded directory authority information (both
  required for the stem.descriptor.remote module and handy for scripting)...

  https://stem.torproject.org/api/descriptor/remote.html#stem.descriptor.remote.DirectoryAuthority

* Added an example of remote descriptor fetching to our tutorials...

  https://stem.torproject.org/tutorials/mirror_mirror_on_the_wall.html#where-can-i-get-the-current-descriptors

* FAQ entry describing other controller libraries...

  https://stem.torproject.org/faq.html#are-there-any-other-controller-libraries

* FAQ entry for the various ways of instantiating a Controller...

  https://stem.torproject.org/faq.html#how-do-i-connect-to-tor

* FAQ entry describing python's 'with' keyword (this has been a common point
  of confusion for new stem users)...

  https://stem.torproject.org/faq.html#what-is-that-with-keyword-i-keep-seeing-in-the-tutorials

* Looked a bit unreliability regarding Tor's DirPort. Unfortunately requests
  for compressed descriptor data frequently fail with a truncated response,
  so Doctor is now requesting uncompressed data (bad, but likely better than
  hammering authorities with retries).

  https://trac.torproject.org/9379

* Assigned joint copyright of Stem to The Tor Project so it can live on if I
  get struck by a meteor, swallowed by a dragon, etc.

* Support for new Tor capabilities including TRANSPORT_LAUNCHED events and
  bridge-ip-transports lines in extrainfo descriptors.

* Overhauled the layout of arm's codebase so it'll behave like a more proper
  python module.

* Discussed using Stem for Bridgedb with sysrqb and isis.

  https://trac.torproject.org/9380

* Answered a few controller related questions on Stack Overflow...

  http://stackoverflow.com/questions/18561778/how-do-i-get-the-ip-address-of-the-tor-entry-node-in-use
  http://stackoverflow.com/questions/18372615/tors-stem-module-python-failing
  http://stackoverflow.com/questions/18578908/torctl-errors-out-with-torctl-connect-attributeerror-module-object-has-no

Cheers! -Damian
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