Hi,
Notes for relay operator meetup, Nov 20 2021, via BBB.
- Torservers.net reanimation - Chat says "we're in": - Nos Oignons - DFRI - Digitalcourage - applied-privacy.net (would like to learn more about it/discuss more) - Discussion about what the purpose of TN was/should be (see below) - One main goal of torservers umbrella is to separate the network of Tor from the development of Tor, so having something like torservers is important. - One useful thing about torservers, from Tor's perspective, is that when excited new people show up wanting to run a relay, we can ask if they're nearby any of the orgs on the partner list and send them there to get connected. - Torservers has RIPE membership, so there's value in being able to get/keep/move network blocks too? - One of the original features of torservers was to take in funding money, and divide it up across organizations that run exits. - We could apply for funding to torservers.net -- or apply as any other org, and then use the torservers infrastructure for dividing it properly. - torservers also in the past was useful at helping people find lawyers in various European countries
- Next Tor activities in CCC rc3 - https://events.ccc.de/2021/11/10/rc3-2021-meta-cfp/ - Leibi really wants to see some more Tor *talks* at CCC this year. We used to do great talks and it's been years since we did. - Roger is not excited to try to do a speech into a webcam -- good Tor talks need an actual audience. But discussions, like relay operator meetups, work a lot better. - We could drum up some talk ideas from core Tor people, and also from other orgs in the Tor ecosystem. We could even glue together several Tor mini-talks, starting from the state-of-the-onion content. - Talk proposal deadline is *real soon now*.
- Announcements - New Tor Forum! https://forum.torproject.net/ - Removing EOL relays and our EOL policy: https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/network-health/team/-/wikis/Relay-EOL-poli... - v2 onion services deprecation: https://forum.torproject.net/t/release-0-3-5-17-0-4-5-11-0-4-6-8-and-0-4-7-2... - I found it surprising that a tor service containing a single v2 onion (next to a number of v3 onions) refused to start after upgrading to a new stable tor release. - ^ The user experience in these situations is always tough -- if your Tor had started, but quietly not actually published any v2 stuff, you would have been differently surprised. At least this way you learned that it wasn't going to work. - Run a bridge campaign https://blog.torproject.org/run-a-bridge-campaign/ (there's a link to the community portal already, on "how to setup bridges")
- Q&A and open topics: - Internship to map and understand the relay operator world, values, etc. - As a precursor to a gamification project, or improving diversity, etc. Read the project: https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/community/team/-/issues/46 - The internship is starting on December 2021.
- Debian stable package release process? - deb.tpo stable package gets updated when it is included in a Debian release - The general policy that weasel has is: things only go onto deb.torproject.org if they are already in some Debian. So that's why there's a delay for new stable releases: they need to bake in Debian sid before they're really in a Debian. - Gman999 and others are reviving the TorBSD project, which includes making sure relays work well on all of the BSD platforms.
- Activities in 2022 - Should we do irc meetings, or video calls and chat like this, or other? - some people like the video angle, because we see real people. - next meetup is at CCC r3C.
- RPM packages - kushal wonders: do any relay operator orgs use the tor rpm? - no-one present is using it
Relay orgs present include: - applied-privacy.net - artikel10 - Calyx - CCC Stuttgart - dfri - digitalcourage - f3 netze - nifty - nos oignons - torservers.net