[tor-relays] [New Initiative] Tor Weather: Improving the Tor Weather

Mailing Lists tor-relays
1

Hello everyone,

As we all know, nodes are the building blocks of the tor-network. More often than not these nodes require some maintenance, which could be in the form of software upgrades, troubleshooting issues, rebooting the relays in case of failures, etc.

As of today, if any relay disappears from the tor-network, no one will know. Tor-Weather aims at solving this by creating a notification service which relay operators can subscribe to in order to get various types of updates for their relays.

The tor-weather service will offer a plethora of notifications options for the relays. These include, the node being down, running on EOL/Outdated version, losing a flag, ranking in top 20/50/100, etc. These notifications can be subscribed & customized by the relay operators to fit their needs using a web-frontend.

Folks interested in the project can refer this thread in the tor-dev mailing list for regular updates. Suggestions are always welcomed! Please reach out to us in irc (#tor-dev) for any ideas, questions, or suggestions you might have.

Thanks,

Sarthik Gupta

1 Like
2

Hey SG,

thats great news, regarding reduction of nodes running Outdated versions.
From time to time torproject needs removing not only a few
EOL relays just because, they running a left alone Outdated version.

Merci
Jonfri

Sarthik Gupta:

¡¡¡

Hello everyone,

As we all know, nodes are the building blocks of the tor-network. More often than not these nodes require some maintenance, which could be in the form of software upgrades, troubleshooting issues, rebooting the relays in case of failures, etc.

As of today, if any relay disappears from the tor-network, no one will know. Tor-Weather aims at solving this by creating a notification service which relay operators can subscribe to in order to get various types of updates for their relays.

The tor-weather service will offer a plethora of notifications options for the relays. These include, the node being down, running on EOL/Outdated version, losing a flag, ranking in top 20/50/100, etc. These notifications can be subscribed & customized by the relay operators to fit their needs using a web-frontend.

Folks interested in the project can refer this <https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-dev/2022-May/014734.html&gt; thread in the tor-dev mailing list for regular updates. Suggestions are always welcomed! Please reach out to us in irc (#tor-dev) for any ideas, questions, or suggestions you might have.

Thanks,

Sarthik Gupta

_______________________________________________
tor-relays mailing list
tor-relays@lists.torproject.org
tor-relays Info Page

1 Like
3

The tor-weather service will offer a plethora of notifications options for
the relays.

If you program something new, see if you can use the old code:

As far as I know, nusenu is also building something new. I don't know if he
has already done something. He'll read this and get in touch.

:wink:
dream: someone resuscitates OnionTip.com or TorTip.com

These include, the node being down, running on EOL/Outdated
version, losing a flag, ranking in top 20/50/100, etc. These notifications
can be subscribed & customized by the relay operators to fit their needs
using a web-frontend.

Please not 'losing a flag'
This confuses people and encourages even more people not to update their
relays. Or like at the moment: 2 Authority voting running relays offline &
flags come and go. Then this list is flooded with mails.

Folks interested in the project can refer this
<https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-dev/2022-May/014734.html&gt;
thread in the tor-dev mailing list for regular updates. Suggestions are
always welcomed! Please reach out to us in irc (#tor-dev) for any ideas,
questions, or suggestions you might have.

Unfortunately, comments are not allowed in:

Cons:
The email provided in the ContactInfo is obfuscated in most of the cases as
they should be according to the torrc documentation. Hence this information
cannot be relied upon.

Please replace the link to the outdated jessie manpage
use stable 'bullseye' or
https://manpages.debian.org/main/tor/torrc.5.en.html

You _MAY_ want to obscure is in the torrc not _SHOULD_ And especially in the
last few weeks, several Tor Dev's have asked:
- DO NOT obfuscate your contact information! Maintainers already burn a lot of
time trying to decipher obfuscated contact info!

Every reasonable email provider has spamassassin and amavisd-new running. We
should tell people to use the header: 'X-Spam-Level: YES'

¡¡¡

On Wednesday, June 8, 2022 3:39:55 AM CEST Sarthik Gupta wrote:

--
╰_╯ Ciao Marco!

Debian GNU/Linux

It's free software and it gives you freedom!

4

Hey, thanks for going through the proposal.

So, prior to writing the proposal for the Tor-Weather, I referred to multiple sources of which https://github.com/thingless/torweather was one. Some parts of the code can be reused, though the implementation differs by a great extent.

It’s nice to know that someone else is also working on a similar project. Would definitely love to interact with nusenu and explore his vision for the project. In case the visions align, it would be great to have a co-contributor.

In terms of the notifications, we considered the issues that could be caused by frequent unreliable notifications, and that’s why we’ll be offering an option to customize each notification individually. For instance, relay operators can customize the “Losing a flag” notification to only get triggered if the relay has lost a flag for a minimum of 24hrs. Take note that this could be any number of hours. I think that should solve the issue.

Prior to sending the previous email, I did try to enable comments on the GitLab wiki, but it seemed a bit complicated to enable. Will be exploring other ways to get this done & will send a follow-up email for that.

Finally, I agree the man-pages listed that the email may be obscure & not should be. Honestly, I didn’t pay attention to that level of detail while writing the proposal, have made the corrections, and will take a look beforehand from the next time.

Thanks & Regards,
Sarthik Gupta

¡¡¡

On Wed, Jun 8, 2022 at 7:49 PM <lists@for-privacy.net> wrote:

On Wednesday, June 8, 2022 3:39:55 AM CEST Sarthik Gupta wrote:

The tor-weather service will offer a plethora of notifications options for
the relays.
If you program something new, see if you can use the old code:
https://github.com/thingless/torweather
As far as I know, nusenu is also building something new. I don’t know if he
has already done something. He’ll read this and get in touch.

:wink:
dream: someone resuscitates OnionTip.com or TorTip.com

These include, the node being down, running on EOL/Outdated
version, losing a flag, ranking in top 20/50/100, etc. These notifications
can be subscribed & customized by the relay operators to fit their needs
using a web-frontend.
Please not ‘losing a flag’
This confuses people and encourages even more people not to update their
relays. Or like at the moment: 2 Authority voting running relays offline &
flags come and go. Then this list is flooded with mails.

Folks interested in the project can refer this
<https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-dev/2022-May/014734.html>
thread in the tor-dev mailing list for regular updates. Suggestions are
always welcomed! Please reach out to us in irc (#tor-dev) for any ideas,
questions, or suggestions you might have.

Unfortunately, comments are not allowed in:
https://gitlab.torproject.org/sarthikg/tor-weather/-/wikis/Proposal

Cons:
The email provided in the ContactInfo is obfuscated in most of the cases as
they should be according to the torrc documentation. Hence this information
cannot be relied upon.

Please replace the link to the outdated jessie manpage
use stable ‘bullseye’ or
https://manpages.debian.org/main/tor/torrc.5.en.html

You MAY want to obscure is in the torrc not SHOULD And especially in the
last few weeks, several Tor Dev’s have asked:

  • DO NOT obfuscate your contact information! Maintainers already burn a lot of
    time trying to decipher obfuscated contact info!

Every reasonable email provider has spamassassin and amavisd-new running. We
should tell people to use the header: ‘X-Spam-Level: YES’

–
╰_╯ Ciao Marco!

Debian GNU/Linux

It’s free software and it gives you freedom!_______________________________________________
tor-relays mailing list
tor-relays@lists.torproject.org
https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-relays

1 Like
5

[Status Update for the Project] - Week-1 & Week-2

Completed

  1. Initialized the Repository:
    a. Used pipenv for managing packages & virtual environments.
    b. Added & configured linters, formatters & other tools.
    c. Created few pre-commit hooks for automating trivial tasks.
    d. Configured dev & prod environments with config file.
    e. Setup a few branch policies on GitLab.

  2. Initiated the Flask App:
    a. Created a shared SMTP package with few utility methods for sending emails.
    b. Configured the process of injecting data in dynamic email templates.
    c. Configured the database connections with the project.
    d. Added models for the tables to be created at startup if does not exist already.

In-Progress

  1. Initiated the development of scripts for fetching data from Onionoo.
  2. Started developing queries for fetching data from the tables including interfaces for each of the responses.

Updates for the Project will also be made available on the Project Wiki - Week 1 & Week 2 ¡ Wiki ¡ sarthikg / Tor-Weather ¡ GitLab (torproject.org).

Thanks & Regards,
Sarthik Gupta

¡¡¡

On Sat, Jun 11, 2022 at 1:00 AM Sarthik Gupta <sarthikg@gmail.com> wrote:

Hey, thanks for going through the proposal.

So, prior to writing the proposal for the Tor-Weather, I referred to multiple sources of which https://github.com/thingless/torweather was one. Some parts of the code can be reused, though the implementation differs by a great extent.

It’s nice to know that someone else is also working on a similar project. Would definitely love to interact with nusenu and explore his vision for the project. In case the visions align, it would be great to have a co-contributor.

In terms of the notifications, we considered the issues that could be caused by frequent unreliable notifications, and that’s why we’ll be offering an option to customize each notification individually. For instance, relay operators can customize the “Losing a flag” notification to only get triggered if the relay has lost a flag for a minimum of 24hrs. Take note that this could be any number of hours. I think that should solve the issue.

Prior to sending the previous email, I did try to enable comments on the GitLab wiki, but it seemed a bit complicated to enable. Will be exploring other ways to get this done & will send a follow-up email for that.

Finally, I agree the man-pages listed that the email may be obscure & not should be. Honestly, I didn’t pay attention to that level of detail while writing the proposal, have made the corrections, and will take a look beforehand from the next time.

Thanks & Regards,
Sarthik Gupta

On Wed, Jun 8, 2022 at 7:49 PM <lists@for-privacy.net> wrote:

On Wednesday, June 8, 2022 3:39:55 AM CEST Sarthik Gupta wrote:

The tor-weather service will offer a plethora of notifications options for
the relays.
If you program something new, see if you can use the old code:
https://github.com/thingless/torweather
As far as I know, nusenu is also building something new. I don’t know if he
has already done something. He’ll read this and get in touch.

:wink:
dream: someone resuscitates OnionTip.com or TorTip.com

These include, the node being down, running on EOL/Outdated
version, losing a flag, ranking in top 20/50/100, etc. These notifications
can be subscribed & customized by the relay operators to fit their needs
using a web-frontend.
Please not ‘losing a flag’
This confuses people and encourages even more people not to update their
relays. Or like at the moment: 2 Authority voting running relays offline &
flags come and go. Then this list is flooded with mails.

Folks interested in the project can refer this
<https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-dev/2022-May/014734.html>
thread in the tor-dev mailing list for regular updates. Suggestions are
always welcomed! Please reach out to us in irc (#tor-dev) for any ideas,
questions, or suggestions you might have.

Unfortunately, comments are not allowed in:
https://gitlab.torproject.org/sarthikg/tor-weather/-/wikis/Proposal

Cons:
The email provided in the ContactInfo is obfuscated in most of the cases as
they should be according to the torrc documentation. Hence this information
cannot be relied upon.

Please replace the link to the outdated jessie manpage
use stable ‘bullseye’ or
https://manpages.debian.org/main/tor/torrc.5.en.html

You MAY want to obscure is in the torrc not SHOULD And especially in the
last few weeks, several Tor Dev’s have asked:

  • DO NOT obfuscate your contact information! Maintainers already burn a lot of
    time trying to decipher obfuscated contact info!

Every reasonable email provider has spamassassin and amavisd-new running. We
should tell people to use the header: ‘X-Spam-Level: YES’

–
╰_╯ Ciao Marco!

Debian GNU/Linux

It’s free software and it gives you freedom!_______________________________________________
tor-relays mailing list
tor-relays@lists.torproject.org
https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-relays

1 Like
6

Hi,

Congratulations of being the GSoC 2022 project.
I have a soft spot for Tor Weather, it was the reason I remember to ask for my tshirts for running my tor nodes.

I would love to help get it back up and running, please let me know how the process works to volunteer.

nullvoid

Sarthik Gupta:

¡¡¡

*[Status Update for the Project] - **Week-1 & Week-2*

*Completed*
*1. Initialized the Repository:*
    a. Used pipenv for managing packages & virtual environments.
    b. Added & configured linters, formatters & other tools.
    c. Created few pre-commit hooks for automating trivial tasks.
    d. Configured dev & prod environments with config file.
    e. Setup a few branch policies on GitLab.

*2. Initiated the Flask App:*
     a. Created a shared SMTP package with few utility methods for sending
emails.
     b. Configured the process of injecting data in dynamic email templates.
     c. Configured the database connections with the project.
     d. Added models for the tables to be created at startup if does not
exist already.

*In-Progress*
1. Initiated the development of scripts for fetching data from Onionoo.
2. Started developing queries for fetching data from the tables including
interfaces for each of the responses.

Updates for the Project will also be made available on the Project Wiki - Week
1 & Week 2 ¡ Wiki ¡ sarthikg / Tor-Weather ¡ GitLab (torproject.org)
<Wiki ¡ The Tor Project / Network Health / Tor-Weather ¡ GitLab;
.

Thanks & Regards,
Sarthik Gupta

On Sat, Jun 11, 2022 at 1:00 AM Sarthik Gupta <sarthikg@gmail.com> wrote:

Hey, thanks for going through the proposal.

So, prior to writing the proposal for the Tor-Weather, I referred
to multiple sources of which GitHub - thingless/torweather was
one. Some parts of the code can be reused, though the implementation
differs by a great extent.

It’s nice to know that someone else is also working on a similar project.
Would definitely love to interact with nusenu and explore his vision for
the project. In case the visions align, it would be great to have a
co-contributor.

In terms of the notifications, we considered the issues that could be
caused by frequent unreliable notifications, and that’s why we’ll be
offering an option to customize each notification individually. For
instance, relay operators can customize the “Losing a flag” notification to
only get triggered if the relay has lost a flag for a minimum of 24hrs.
Take note that this could be any number of hours. I think that should solve
the issue.

Prior to sending the previous email, I did try to enable comments on the
GitLab wiki, but it seemed a bit complicated to enable. Will be exploring
other ways to get this done & will send a follow-up email for that.

Finally, I agree the man-pages listed that the email may be obscure & not
should be. Honestly, I didn’t pay attention to that level of detail while
writing the proposal, have made the corrections, and will take a look
beforehand from the next time.

Thanks & Regards,
Sarthik Gupta

On Wed, Jun 8, 2022 at 7:49 PM <lists@for-privacy.net> wrote:

On Wednesday, June 8, 2022 3:39:55 AM CEST Sarthik Gupta wrote:

The tor-weather service will offer a plethora of notifications options

for

the relays.

If you program something new, see if you can use the old code:
GitHub - thingless/torweather
As far as I know, nusenu is also building something new. I don't know if
he
has already done something. He'll read this and get in touch.

:wink:
dream: someone resuscitates OnionTip.com or TorTip.com

These include, the node being down, running on EOL/Outdated
version, losing a flag, ranking in top 20/50/100, etc. These

notifications

can be subscribed & customized by the relay operators to fit their needs
using a web-frontend.

Please not 'losing a flag'
This confuses people and encourages even more people not to update their
relays. Or like at the moment: 2 Authority voting running relays offline
&
flags come and go. Then this list is flooded with mails.

Folks interested in the project can refer this
<https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-dev/2022-May/014734.html&gt;
thread in the tor-dev mailing list for regular updates. Suggestions are
always welcomed! Please reach out to us in irc (#tor-dev) for any ideas,
questions, or suggestions you might have.

Unfortunately, comments are not allowed in:
https://gitlab.torproject.org/sarthikg/tor-weather/-/wikis/Proposal

Cons:
The email provided in the ContactInfo is obfuscated in most of the cases
as
they should be according to the torrc documentation. Hence this
information
cannot be relied upon.

Please replace the link to the outdated jessie manpage
use stable 'bullseye' or
torrc(5) — tor — Debian bookworm — Debian Manpages

You _MAY_ want to obscure is in the torrc not _SHOULD_ And especially in
the
last few weeks, several Tor Dev's have asked:
- DO NOT obfuscate your contact information! Maintainers already burn a
lot of
time trying to decipher obfuscated contact info!

Every reasonable email provider has spamassassin and amavisd-new running.
We
should tell people to use the header: 'X-Spam-Level: YES'

--
╰_╯ Ciao Marco!

Debian GNU/Linux

It's free software and it gives you
freedom!_______________________________________________
tor-relays mailing list
tor-relays@lists.torproject.org
tor-relays Info Page

_______________________________________________
tor-relays mailing list
tor-relays@lists.torproject.org
tor-relays Info Page

1 Like
7

Hey,

Apologies for getting back a bit late. While the project wasn’t in a stage where contributing would have been easy at that time, now, I have worked to make sure that understanding the codebase and contributing to it is a breeze for anyone.

In the current stage, most of the heavy-lifting pieces like authentication, authorization, verification, login, register flows are in place with a lot of utility functions that can be consumed across the application. The only major part left is the dashboard itself. If you are interested, you can contribute in its development.

Thanks & Regards,
Sarthik Gupta

¡¡¡

On Mon, Jul 4, 2022 at 11:44 AM nullvoid <tor@nullvoid.me> wrote:

Hi,

Congratulations of being the GSoC 2022 project.
I have a soft spot for Tor Weather, it was the reason I remember to ask
for my tshirts for running my tor nodes.

I would love to help get it back up and running, please let me know how
the process works to volunteer.

nullvoid

Sarthik Gupta:

*[Status Update for the Project] - *Week-1 & Week-2

Completed
1. Initialized the Repository:
a. Used pipenv for managing packages & virtual environments.
b. Added & configured linters, formatters & other tools.
c. Created few pre-commit hooks for automating trivial tasks.
d. Configured dev & prod environments with config file.
e. Setup a few branch policies on GitLab.

2. Initiated the Flask App:
a. Created a shared SMTP package with few utility methods for sending
emails.
b. Configured the process of injecting data in dynamic email templates.
c. Configured the database connections with the project.
d. Added models for the tables to be created at startup if does not
exist already.

In-Progress

  1. Initiated the development of scripts for fetching data from Onionoo.
  2. Started developing queries for fetching data from the tables including
    interfaces for each of the responses.

Updates for the Project will also be made available on the Project Wiki - Week
1 & Week 2 ¡ Wiki ¡ sarthikg / Tor-Weather ¡ GitLab (torproject.org)
<https://gitlab.torproject.org/sarthikg/tor-weather/-/wikis/Project-Status-Updates/Week-1-&-Week-2>
.

Thanks & Regards,
Sarthik Gupta

On Sat, Jun 11, 2022 at 1:00 AM Sarthik Gupta <sarthikg@gmail.com> wrote:

Hey, thanks for going through the proposal.

So, prior to writing the proposal for the Tor-Weather, I referred
to multiple sources of which https://github.com/thingless/torweather was
one. Some parts of the code can be reused, though the implementation
differs by a great extent.

It’s nice to know that someone else is also working on a similar project.
Would definitely love to interact with nusenu and explore his vision for
the project. In case the visions align, it would be great to have a
co-contributor.

In terms of the notifications, we considered the issues that could be
caused by frequent unreliable notifications, and that’s why we’ll be
offering an option to customize each notification individually. For
instance, relay operators can customize the “Losing a flag” notification to
only get triggered if the relay has lost a flag for a minimum of 24hrs.
Take note that this could be any number of hours. I think that should solve
the issue.

Prior to sending the previous email, I did try to enable comments on the
GitLab wiki, but it seemed a bit complicated to enable. Will be exploring
other ways to get this done & will send a follow-up email for that.

Finally, I agree the man-pages listed that the email may be obscure & not
should be. Honestly, I didn’t pay attention to that level of detail while
writing the proposal, have made the corrections, and will take a look
beforehand from the next time.

Thanks & Regards,
Sarthik Gupta

On Wed, Jun 8, 2022 at 7:49 PM <lists@for-privacy.net> wrote:

On Wednesday, June 8, 2022 3:39:55 AM CEST Sarthik Gupta wrote:

The tor-weather service will offer a plethora of notifications options
for
the relays.
If you program something new, see if you can use the old code:
https://github.com/thingless/torweather
As far as I know, nusenu is also building something new. I don’t know if
he
has already done something. He’ll read this and get in touch.

:wink:
dream: someone resuscitates OnionTip.com or TorTip.com

These include, the node being down, running on EOL/Outdated
version, losing a flag, ranking in top 20/50/100, etc. These
notifications
can be subscribed & customized by the relay operators to fit their needs
using a web-frontend.
Please not ‘losing a flag’
This confuses people and encourages even more people not to update their
relays. Or like at the moment: 2 Authority voting running relays offline
&
flags come and go. Then this list is flooded with mails.

Folks interested in the project can refer this
<https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-dev/2022-May/014734.html>
thread in the tor-dev mailing list for regular updates. Suggestions are
always welcomed! Please reach out to us in irc (#tor-dev) for any ideas,
questions, or suggestions you might have.

Unfortunately, comments are not allowed in:
https://gitlab.torproject.org/sarthikg/tor-weather/-/wikis/Proposal

Cons:
The email provided in the ContactInfo is obfuscated in most of the cases
as
they should be according to the torrc documentation. Hence this
information
cannot be relied upon.

Please replace the link to the outdated jessie manpage
use stable ‘bullseye’ or
https://manpages.debian.org/main/tor/torrc.5.en.html

You MAY want to obscure is in the torrc not SHOULD And especially in
the
last few weeks, several Tor Dev’s have asked:

  • DO NOT obfuscate your contact information! Maintainers already burn a
    lot of
    time trying to decipher obfuscated contact info!

Every reasonable email provider has spamassassin and amavisd-new running.
We
should tell people to use the header: ‘X-Spam-Level: YES’

–
╰_╯ Ciao Marco!

Debian GNU/Linux

It’s free software and it gives you
freedom!_______________________________________________
tor-relays mailing list
tor-relays@lists.torproject.org
https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-relays

tor-relays mailing list
tor-relays@lists.torproject.org
https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-relays

tor-relays mailing list
tor-relays@lists.torproject.org
https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-relays

1 Like