Re: [tor-relays] Tor Weather (was: Relay advocate introduction)

[Tom Ritter <tom@xxxxxxxxx>]

I have an email draft about ideas for Colin I haven't finished and Tor
Weather was going to be top of the list. So add another voice to the
crowd.

-tom

On 17 May 2018 at 16:48, Matthew Glennon <matthew@glennon.online> wrote:
> I don't know if it's helpful, but I use pulseway.com to monitor my relay
> (aand all of my other servers).
>
> On Thu, May 17, 2018 at 5:40 PM Colin Childs <colin@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>>
>> Hello Nusenu,
>>
>> Thank you for bringing this up and filing the ticket, this definitely
>> sounds like something that should be brought back in some form. I’m going to
>> look things over, review the history of Tor Weather and then make a plan for
>> moving this forward.
>>
>> A monitoring service (like Tor Weather) has also been requested from a few
>> other operators as well; so I think this is definitely something that will
>> make the community happier as a whole.
>>
>> > On May 17, 2018, at 2:44 PM, nusenu <nusenu-lists@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>> >
>> > Colin Childs:
>> >> I would love to hear from all of you with the things you would find
>> >> most helpful from me / the Tor Project
>> > I believe the most useful tool for relay operators and
>> > the tor network as a whole would be to bring back Tor Weather.
>> >
>> > I filed it as
>> > https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/26124
>> >
>> >
>> > Full text bellow
>> > ---------------------------------
>> > TL;DR: I believe Tor Weather is the most efficient way to achieve and
>> > maintain a healthy Tor network on the long run.
>> >
>> > This is an item on the metrics team road map ("Q4 2018 or later") but
>> > maybe the new relay advocate (Colin) can help with this?
>> >
>> > Tor Weather has been discontinued on 2016-04-04,
>> > see Karsten's email for the reasoning behind it:
>> > https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-relays/2016-April/009009.html
>> > but as he says "Tor Weather is still a good idea, it just needs somebody
>> > to implement it."
>> >
>> > How Tor Weather looked like:
>> >
>> > https://web.archive.org/web/20141004055709/https://weather.torproject.org/subscribe/
>> >
>> >
>> > **Motivation**
>> >
>> > If a relay disappears today, it is unlikely that anyone will notice or
>> > even send an email to the operator unless it is a big one.
>> >
>> > Relay operators and the entire tor network would benefit from a Tor
>> > Weather service because it notifies relay operators when the state of their
>> > relays changed (and more). This will increase the likelihood that relay
>> > operators notice problems and actually mitigate the problem otherwise there
>> > is no "user feedback" since tor can cope with disappearing relays quite
>> > well.
>> > It also
>> > * shows the relay operator that someone actually cares if their relays
>> > go down or become outdated or have another problem
>> > * gives the operator relay best-practices information.
>> >
>> > **Expected Effects**
>> >
>> > If enough operators subscribe to such a service:
>> > * relays might become more long lived / the churn rate might decrease
>> > * the fraction of relays running outdated tor versions might decrease
>> > * the fraction of exits with broken DNS might decrease
>> >
>> > It also has the benefit of being able to contact relay operators
>> > * completely automatically
>> > * even if they choose to not set a public ContactInfo string in their
>> > torrc files.
>> >
>> > **ideas for selectable notification types**
>> > (sorted by importance)
>> >
>> > Support subscribing via single relay FP or MyFamily groups (should not
>> > need any subscription change if a relay gets added to the family).
>> >
>> > [ ] Email me when my node is down
>> > How long before we send a notification? ________
>> > [ ] email me when my relay is affected by a security vulnerability
>> > [ ] email me when my relay runs an end-of-life version of tor
>> >
>> > [ ] email me when my relay runs an outdated tor version (note: this
>> > should depend on the related onionoo bugs to avoid emailing alpha relay
>> > people)
>> >
>> > [ ] email me when my exit relay fails to resolve hostnames (DNS failure)
>> >
>> > [ ] email me when my relay looses the [ ] stable, [ ] guard, [ ] exit
>> > flag
>> >
>> > [ ] email me when my MyFamily configuration is broken (meaning:
>> > non-mutual config detected or relay with same contactInfo but no MyFamily)
>> > [ ] email me when you detect issues with my relay
>> > [ ] email me with suggestions for configuration improvements for my
>> > relay (only once per improvement)
>> >
>> > [ ] email me when my relay is on the top [ ] 20 [ ] 50 [ ] 100 relays
>> > list
>> >
>> > [ ] email me with monthly/quarterly status information that includes
>> > information like what my position in the overall relay list is (sorted by
>> > CW), how much traffic my relay did during the last month and what fraction
>> > of the months time your relay was included in consensus as running (this
>> > shows information on how many % of the months' consensuses this relay has
>> > been included and running)
>> > [ ] aggregate emails for all my relays into a single digest email
>> > [ ] email me about new relay requirements
>> > [ ] email me about tor relay operator events
>> >
>> > * Write a specification describing the meaning of each checkbox
>> >
>> > **Security and Privacy Implications**
>> >
>> > The service stores email addresses of potential tor relay operators,
>> > they should be kept private and safeguarded, but a passive observer can
>> > collect them by watching outbound email traffic if no TLS is used. Suggest
>> > to use a dedicated email address for this service.
>> >
>> > **Additional Ideas**
>> >
>> > * easy: integration into tor: show the URL pointing to the new Tor
>> > Weather service like the current link to the lifecycle blogpost when tor
>> > starts and detects to be a new relay
>> > * Provide an uptimerobot-style status page for relay operators using
>> > onionoo data
>> >
>> >
>> >
>> > --
>> > https://mastodon.social/@nusenu
>> > twitter: @nusenu_
>> >
>> > _______________________________________________
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>>
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>
> --
> Matthew Glennon
> matthew@glennon.online
> PGP Signing Available Upon Request
> https://keybase.io/crazysane
>
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