Re: [tor-talk] Consensus Health Checker Check

[Karsten Loesing <karsten@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On 7/6/13 9:47 AM, Sebastian G. <bastik.tor> wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> How do I know that the Consensus Health Checker checked a consensus?
> (How do I check the Consensus Health Checker?)
> 
> Background:
> I get emails like
> 'WARNING: $warning_text $authority1' for the consensuses 00:00, 01:00,
> 03:00, 04:00, 07:00 (pulled out of my head)
> 
> Since I got no mails for 02:00, 05:00 and 06:00, the warning does not
> seem to have occurred then, while it *could* be the case that it did
> occur but the checker did not check. Dannenberg made me think that this
> could be the case since, according to Atlas, powered by data from
> Onionoo, it was not running and would be unable to respond to requests.
> 
> Supposed the checker worked and there won't be any problem with the
> consensus for, let's say, a month.... How to see if there's actually no
> problem with the consensus(es) or if the checker is down? (How to check
> the checker?)

The consensus-health checker rate-limits warnings to reduce the noise.
See this part in the code:

https://gitweb.torproject.org/doctor.git/blob/HEAD:/src/org/torproject/doctor/StatusFileReport.java#l89

For example, a message "The following directory authorities did not
return a consensus within a timeout of 60 seconds: $authorities" won't
be repeated in the next 150 minutes.

Ideally, I'd want to reduce volume of consensus-health messages even
more, for example, using #9103.

So, the idea behind consensus-health messages is to get a notification
of *current* problems, not at all to investigate problems in the *past*.
 You'll want to use Atlas or relay-search or the descriptor archives for
that.


So, how to check the checker?  Fine question!  One solution might be to
run a second checker.  Want to do that and report problems that the
first checker overlooked?  In theory, setting up DocTor is easy:

https://gitweb.torproject.org/doctor.git/blob/HEAD:/README

Best,
Karsten

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