Hi,

Here are the meetup notes from April 2024. Sorry for sharing it only now.

The next meetup will happen this Saturday, May 11, 2024 at 19 UTC. Feel free to add your topics here: https://pad.riseup.net/p/tor-relay-may24-meetup-keep

cheers, Gus

## Notes - Tor Relay Operator Meetup - April 13rd, 2024 @ 19 UTC

- Announcements: - New Network Health Team lead Read more about the network health team, and its goals and priorities, at https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/network-health/team

- 0.4.7 EOL removal Dir auths upgraded to 0.4.8.11 and relays running 0.4.7 were removed. Dir auth Serge will upgrade to 0.4.8.11 sometime in May as getting new bridges is harder than getting new relays. If you don't upgrade your logs will tell you that you need to upgrade.

- Relay operator census: https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-relays/2024-March/021580.html Please fill out their survey! It takes some time to answer the questions, but it is helpful to us for understanding our community. Even if you used to run a relay and don't now, it's still useful. We will publish the results of the survey in an anonymous way. It is funded by OTF to fund fellowships for the people working on it. 80 responses so far, which is good since it's only been publicized on the mailing list. Next step is to mail the ContactInfo addresses for relay operators to let them know about it.

English: https://survey.torproject.org/index.php/751125?lang=en Spanish: https://survey.torproject.org/index.php/751125?lang=es

- Tor-Weather 2.0 Release: https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-relays/2024-March/021578.html Tor weather is a service to notify you when your relay or bridge goes down.

- New directory authority, tor26, and upcoming return of directory authority, Faravahar. Not because of any compromise or anything -- it's because tor26 moved to new hardware and a new internet location, so he decided it was a good time to rotate to fresh keys.

- Updates on the (D)dos situation Some relay operators are still seeing an ongoing overload, and some users were seeing speed issues. It sounds like some guards are overloaded and some are less. It sounds like exit relay operators are less impacted by this recent issue. What in particular is overloaded? Memory, sockets, bandwidth? We don't know -- the "overloaded" flag on relay-search doesn't tell us more specifics.

- Elections 2024: previous (March) / next round (April) Russia: before the elections, they blocked ntc.party, which is a major resource for internet censorship discussion/advice. After the elections, they blocked one further Tor website mirror. It looks like some of our other mirrors, e.g. tor.eff.org, had been blocked already there. Downloads via official site (dist.torproject.org, not www.torproject.org) still work though. Upcoming elections in India, Panama, Dominican Republic, South Africa For India, check out https://internetshutdowns.in/ run by SFLC in India. As you've seen from the transparency reports there, the number of internet shutdowns is in the past five years is unprecedented.

- New policy: guidelines for sustainability and incentivization proposals for the Tor network. - If you want to get some background on past tor incentive designs, check out https://blog.torproject.org/tor-incentives-research-roundup-goldstar-par-bra... (now 10 years old!) - The new meta-proposal for how to structure your sustainability / incentives ideas will go public after some more interaction between Tor stakeholders before opening to the community. - Another ideas raised: small grants proposal, to do trainings for relay operators in areas or situations or countries where we need more participation. - Other ideas: it would be great for somebody to explore a badge-based gamification idea. Some of the work involved: what exactly do we want to incentivize? - Link: https://community.torproject.org/policies/relays/001-community-relay-operato...

# Questions & Answers

* Q: zimmer family hitting max descriptor size https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/core/tor/-/issues/40837 Any news on a possible solution to this ongoing issue? This is due to zimmer's family being really big. The eventual plan is to move to a new design, e.g. https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/core/torspec/-/blob/main/proposals/321-hap... But the network team doesn't want to spend time working on C-Tor, and Arti relays are more than a year off, so we're in an awkward holding pattern.

* Q: the tor-relays@ list needs a moderator now that geko is taking a break. There are several queued messages from last week. A: Hiro needs to get the credentials for moderating tor-relays@.

* Q: Is the conflux design actually helping with performance? What stats do we have there? (Question comes from the recent tor-relays@ thread about Conflux, crash bugs, and performance.)

A: This is a good question and we would like to see some data that supports the claim that conflux made things better for tor browser users. One idea: the Arti Tor client does not have Conflux support, but the C-Tor one does, and we could compare. Better idea: compare a C-Tor with conflux enabled, to a C-Tor with conflux disabled. The onionperf data sets are already doing this, and the data exists, and the clear next step is to do analysis and see what the data says.

* Q: Any exciting news about the "Arti for relays" status/plan?

A: Might/will only happen next year, "Uncomfortably far in the future." And by 'happen' we mean 'begin to happen'.

* Q: Are there plans for IPv6 only snowflakes/bridges/relay/exit-nodes/… ?

For relays, no because it's complicated. Someone needs to look into it, as having ipv4 connectivity and only relaying traffic on ipv6 might be doable.

For bridges, they should work for incoming ipv6, barring bugs or unfinished design issues. But for bridges that only have ipv6, and can't even connect *out* to IPv4, more design work is needed, because the client will ask the bridge to extend to an IPv4 relay and it will fail.

More generally, I think somebody needs to take on the IPv6 project, figure out the whole landscape, decide what issues are bugs or not-yet-done design work. I don't know that anybody on the network team has a plan for that.

For snowflakes, it's just a matter of having the broker pair up censored users to proxies, so it should be simpler and easier. This would be a great project for somebody here to pick up!

* Q: When will the snowflake debian package be updated? A: We will check with Meskio.

* Q: Are other exit operators also affected by the increase of DNS timeout rates since 2024-03-31? https://mastodon.social/@applied_privacy/112220903672728456 (so far confirmed from: applied-privacy and NTH)

A: One complexity here: higher timeout rates could be from actual problems impacting actual users, or it could be from some jerk asking a lot of dns questions for addresses that don't exist. It's hard to tell the difference from the outside, without some sort of (privacy-preserving) way to look at the queries themselves.

* Q: Any plans for fixing https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/core/tor/-/issues/40924 ? A:Sounds like we need a network team person who works on C-Tor, and that's dgoulet.

On Sat, Apr 13, 2024 at 11:54:48AM -0300, gus wrote:

Hi!

Just a friendly reminder that we're meeting today (Saturday, April 13) at 19 UTC.

• Please feel free to add other topics here:

https://pad.riseup.net/p/tor-relay-april-meetup-keep

# Meetup details

• Room link: https://tor.meet.coop/gus-og0-x74-dzn
• When: April 13, 2024 - 19.00 UTC
• Duration: 60 to 90 minutes

Gus

On Tue, Apr 09, 2024 at 04:57:41PM -0300, gus wrote:

...

Hello,

The Tor Relay Operator will happen this Saturday, April 13 at 19UTC!

## Agenda

• Announcements:
  • New Network Health Team lead
  • 0.4.7 EOL removal
  • Relay Operator census
• Elections 2024: previous (March) / next round (April)
• Q&A
• Please feel free to add other topics here:

https://pad.riseup.net/p/tor-relay-april-meetup-keep

## Meetup details

• Room link: https://tor.meet.coop/gus-og0-x74-dzn
• When: April 13, 2024 - 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.

cheers, Gus -- The Tor Project Community Team Lead

...

---

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

-- The Tor Project Community Team Lead