[tor-talk] Node Down and Old Version Notifications

[Kevin Gallagher]

Interesting! My node never got any of these notifications. I wonder why 
that is. I'll check this out!

Thanks,

Kevin

On 12/17/18 4:02 PM, Chris Dagdigian wrote:
> I think someone else is already doing this -- at least for down nodes
>
> I run a small exit node and when the box gets OOM and hangs I get an 
> email with the subject: "[Tor Weather] Node Down!"
>
> And that has a URL about the maintainer and code:
>
> The original Tor Weather was decommissioned by the Tor project and 
> this replacement is now maintained independently. You can learn more here:
> https://github.com/thingless/torweather/blob/master/README.md
>
>
>
>
>> Kevin Gallagher <mailto:kcg295 at nyu.edu>
>> December 17, 2018 at 3:58 PM
>> Hello everyone,
>>
>> The other day I got a really helpful e-mail. It seems a person named 
>> Paul wrote a program to check the PGP key servers and e-mail people 
>> to let them know that their keys are about to expire. After updating 
>> my key I thought about how an approach like this on the Tor consensus 
>> could be used to notify people when their Tor node goes down, or when 
>> their version of Tor is out of date and therefore their node becomes 
>> "not recommended."
>>
>> Though such a tool might be useful, I wonder if it is in the spirit 
>> of Tor. I know that a lot of people obfuscate their e-mail when 
>> running a Tor node (using AT instead of @, etc.), and I'm sure part 
>> of the reason this is being done is because they don't want to be 
>> contacted by bots. However, maybe they would want to be notified if 
>> their node went down or was out of date.
>>
>> Are there any thoughts on whether or not a tool like this is a good 
>> idea? If people think it's in the spirit of Tor I'm willing to sit 
>> down and try to write it up.
>>
>> Thanks,
>>
>> Kevin
>>
>
-- 
Kevin Gallagher
Ph.D. Candidate
Center For Cybersecurity
NYU Tandon School of Engineering
Key Fingerprint: D02B 25CB 0F7D E276 06C3  BF08 53E4 C50F 8247 4861