Hi,
Thank you to all who joined us last Saturday!
Save the date: Our next meetup will be on June 22 at 19 UTC.
After that, we'll take a summer break and resume at the end-of-August or
beginning-of-September.
Please see our meetup notes below.
cheers,
Gus
## Tor Relay Operator Meetup Notes - May 11, 2024
1. Announcements
1.1 EOL 0.4.7 removed from the network. Bridges are next. Please upgrade your bridge (and your relay, really) if it's still on Tor 0.4.7.x!
1.2 Launch of Tor book, chapter about relay operators ("5. Enter the Maintainers"): https://direct.mit.edu/books/oa-monograph/5761/chapter/4701082/Enter-the-Maintainers
1.3 Snowflake add-on issue. Mozilla asked us to create a privacy policy, and if you interact with user IP addresses at all, you need to get users to consent / accept your privacy policy. The Snowflake extension had a confusing UX which didn't lead users to realize they needed to click. The new version, out yesterday, helps you realize there is now a button to click.
1.4 Memory queue size limitations (to 8GB by default) and MaxMemInQueues option
See: https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/network-health/analysis/-/issues/71#note_3025929 for the gist
1.5 Announcement from Nothing to hide (to read, no need to discuss):
- There will be some changes in the Nothing to hide organization and our networks. We inform other operators this way in case people wonder what is happening or have worries about the changes.
- The Nothing to hide organization has become a part of the Church of Cyberology (https://cyberology.church). This makes it possible to run Tor relays from our own autonomous system while increasing financial benefits and offering better legal protection. We're still setting up the church so not everything is polished yet.
- Nothing to hide will migrate to AS215125 (run by the Church of Cyberology) in the coming months. As a part of this migration, current IPv6 address space will be migrated to 2001:67c:e60::/48. The migration will take place in phases and will take a while due to infrastructural complexities and dependencies.
1.6 Relay operator census! Victoria and Ana sent out the survey request to many relay operators last week. This survey is endorsed/supported by us -- you can see that because it's on survey.torproject.org.
1.7 Conflux performance graphs. Last meetup there was a question about whether conflux is improving performance ("do we have measurements?"). The graph shows four onionperf instances (2 in the US, 2 in hong kong) where one of each of conflux and the other is non-conflux. The graph shows a slight throughput improvement for the conflux-using onionperfs.
- If you have any questions, let us know!
2. Questions & Answers
2.1. Q: Meskio has committed & merged: https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/rdsys/-/issues/106
Is it already running on Rdsys?
No, it will be deployed next week.
rdsys is being having an issue of bridges switching distributors, as the assignments was based on IP, port and fingerprint. We have changed rdsys so the assignment happens once when rdsys find out about the bridge and keep that decision. The code is already implemented, but not deployed yet. We plan to deploy it next week.
2.2. Q: Could you give a status update about applying a ExitPolicy to already established outbound connections and re-evaluating the ExitPolicy on running relays (without having to restart them)? See also https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/core/tor/-/issues/40676. This would really help with combating DDoS attacks (which have become worse again as of late), allow to block certain IP addresses at the request of system owners and make the ExitPolicy more flexible in general.
This is merged|implemented in Tor-nightly 0.4.9.0-alpha-dev. I have all my exits running with it. https://metrics.torproject.org/rs.html#search/ForPrivacyNET
I also posted about this in the tor-relays-list in January: https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-relays/2024-January/021484.html
You need to add "ReevaluateExitPolicy 1" to the torrc.
2.3. Q: Are these parameters a good idea for a server that runs only a relay?
https://github.com/Enkidu-6/tor-ddos?tab=readme-ov-file#first-step-preparing-your-system-for-high-number-of-connections
Please try our and let us know if you see some improvements in your non-exit relay.
2.4. Q: When is the next online meetup?
It will be June 22 at 19utc. After that we will take a summer break, and resume end-of-August or beginning-of-September.
2.5 Q: Tor has the MetricsPort since quite some time but there isn't much information about what to do with the data like how to get any meaningful insights out of it. Are operators that have some Grafana dashboards (even if not perfect and containing some internal assumptions) or alarms interested to share those, so we can get ideas from others and improve them? Where should we share them?
A: Great question. Consider sharing on tor-relays@ mailing list. We could also put a space in the Tor forum for the topic. Eventually we, the network health or network team, should publish recommendations on what we think you should *do* with your metricsport.
Idea: The network health team has some internal graphana dashboards, and we should publish those configurations for people.
Idea: at the CCC meetup in December, the Applied Privacy folks were sharing their configurations for their own exporters -- not just metricsports but other data collectors too.
Idea: look also at onionprobe's graphana dashboard, https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/onion-services/onionprobe/-/issues/80#note_3020820
2.6. Q: Roger wants to ask people if they remember the German university recommending Snowflake to its students -- this happened around October 2022, when the Iran thing was at its peak. Does anybody remember details? I want to use the example when talking to NREN operators in France in June.
https://asta.uni-saarland.de/ein-weg-um-staatliche-zensur-snowflake/#
Yay! If you are the one who added this url please let me know. :)
keep in mind this isn't from the university directly but from the student organization
Is this the post that got all the attention back then? Or was there something more official from a university itself?
https://juso-hsg-freiburg.de/2022/12/06/mit-schneeflocken-die-revolution-im-iran-unterstuetzen/
Events:
- May 25th in Lisbon there will be a Tor Community Day, come if you are around!!!
- Meetup at EMFCamp (Eastnor, England) 30 May-2 June 2024
2.7. Q: when will the snowflake debian package gets updated?
A: If somebody here wants to pick up the debian packaging work for this, please step up! Otherwise it will be an unknown amount of time still.
Other answer: I think the version of Snowflake in Debian is still worth running -- it doesn't have major security, censorship, performance issues.
2.8. Q: What is the status with the "relay sustainability proposals policy" work?
A: The policy is still under construction, because we showed it to some folks and they had improvements / clarifications in mind. One of the changes is that there is a new section explaining in what situations you *don't* need to write a proposal, ask permission, etc. (E.g. "I'm a relay operator association and I want to give out tshirts to my group")
2.9. Q: Idea for next time, do an informal survey of the participants in the meetup:
- how long have you run relays
- OS,provider,hardware v virtual...
- or do you not run relays yet and you are still looking into it
nothing scientific but would be interesting to know relays attendees run
On Sat, May 11, 2024 at 11:53:48AM -0300, gus wrote:
> Hello!
>
> Just a friendly reminder that the Tor Relay Operator Meetup is today
> (May 11) @ 19 UTC!
>
> Room link: https://tor.meet.coop/gus-og0-x74-dzn
> Duration: 60 to 90 minutes
>
> Agenda:
> https://pad.riseup.net/p/tor-relay-may24-meetup-keep
>
> Talk soon,
> Gus
>
> On Thu, May 02, 2024 at 01:49:09PM -0300, gus wrote:
> > Hi,
> >
> > Please save the date: the next Tor Relay Operator will happen Saturday,
> > May 11 at 19UTC!
> >
> > We're still working on the agenda for this meetup, however feel free to
> > add your topics directly to this ticket or just reply to the mailing list:
> > https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/community/relays/-/issues/92
> >
> > Meetup details
> >
> > - Room link: https://tor.meet.coop/gus-og0-x74-dzn
> > - When: May 11, 19.00 UTC
> > - Duration: 60 to 90 minutes
> > - Tor Code of Conduct:
> > https://community.torproject.org/policies/code_of_conduct/
> > - Registration: No need for a registration or anything else, just use the
> > room-linkabove. We will open the room 10 minutes before.
> >
> > I'll send soon the last meetup notes to the list.
> >
> > Gus
> > --
> > The Tor Project
> > Community Team Lead
>
>
>
> --
> The Tor Project
> Community Team Lead
--
The Tor Project
Community Team Lead
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