Usability Improvements for Atlas (was Re: Globe is now retired)
Hi All, On 29/06/16 09:56, Karsten Loesing wrote:
tl;dr: Globe is now retired in favor of an improved Atlas.
Atlas is improved, but I'd like to improve it further. I've been tackling #6787 looking to improve the homepage and make Atlas easier to use for someone that isn't already a Tor expert. The changes I'm proposing in my fix for #6787 [1] do make some noticeable UI changes and I just want to gather some opinions on whether or not Atlas users feel that this is taking it in the right direction. The "Top 10 Relays" page was added to Atlas in order to make sure that functionality was not lost when shutting down globe. (See #5430 [2]) In my proposed patch, I'm also adding an "Authorities" page and adding text to both of these pages to explain what you're seeing. These are linked from the homepage, and from the top navbar. I'm also moving the introduction and explanation of the Atlas features from the About page to the homepage and introducing a new Help page that explains the details that are found in the relay details pages. You can find a live example of this patch at: https://irl.github.io/atlas/#/ and a full list of changes are detailed in #6787. Please let me know if you can see any reason to not merge this, or if you have any suggestions for small changes before merging. Thanks, Iain. [1]: https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/5430 [2]: https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/6787
Minor issue: there's no need to have the Show XXX entries dropdown on the "Top 10 Relays" page (https://irl.github.io/atlas/#/top10) since it's designed to show only 10. In fact changing the selection does nothing. On Wed, Jun 29, 2016 at 1:05 PM, Iain R. Learmonth <irl@torproject.org> wrote:
On 30 Jun 2016, at 07:32, Green Dream <greendream848@gmail.com> wrote:
Minor issue: there's no need to have the Show XXX entries dropdown on the "Top 10 Relays" page (https://irl.github.io/atlas/#/top10) since it's designed to show only 10. In fact changing the selection does nothing.
This issue also exists for the Authorities page. (And if there are ever more than 10 of them, we'd want to show all of them, not just the top 10.)
Tim Wilson-Brown (teor) teor2345 at gmail dot com PGP 968F094B ricochet:ekmygaiu4rzgsk6n
In 0.2.8, relays with enough bandwidth automatically become directory mirrors, serving directory documents over their ORPort(s). So we could change the Dir Addresses as follows: Dir Addresses IP addresses and TCP port numbers to which Tor clients can connect to retrieve directory information. These will only be shown if the relay is configured to serve this information using Dir Addresses, and this helps reduce the load on directory authorities. (All bridges, and some relays, also serve directory documents over their OR Addresses.)
Tim Wilson-Brown (teor) teor2345 at gmail dot com PGP 968F094B ricochet:ekmygaiu4rzgsk6n
The front page is good. On a relay's page could you show whether it is running or not? Robert
I meant, since I have a number of relays, for Atlas to tell me which ones are not going without having to look into each in detail first.
As far as I can tell, relays that are not running are not included in the search results. You'll only see relays that are active in the consensus. I'm not sure how long they take to drop off though. What is the use case here though? Monitoring? If so, I think Atlas isn't the best tool for the job.
A server monitoring tool. :-) https://www.google.com/search?q=server+monitoring There are many good options. I like StatusCake because they have a free tier which does everything you'd need for monitoring Tor relays. You can have it verify the fingerprint of your relay (via the information exposed by your DirPort) at the same time it checks if it's running. There are a lot of other choices for hosted monitoring. Pingdom is a popular commercial choice. There's also a wide variety of open source tools if you want to do it yourself and not rely on a third party. Icinga is a popular open source choice.
Iain, Thanks for making improvements to atlas! Here are a few thoughts on it: o What about having a search bar front and center, and not off in the corner? I think it could be more obvious visually that it's a good widget to use. o When you sort the Top 10 relays (or any set of relays I'd guess), it'd be useful to have a visual indication of which column is sorted, and in which direction. o Sorting the uptime column, it looks like it sorts as a string and not as a number. So it sorts to: 107d, 12d, 15d, 20d, etc. -Greg On Wed, Jun 29, 2016 at 8:20 PM, I <beatthebastards@inbox.com> wrote:
This is "server automation". Ansible, Chef and Puppet are popular solutions. Ansible seems to be popular for Tor relays, with several existing playbooks available (search for "tor ansible"). I'm really not much of a Windows guy so I'm not sure about the extent of Windows support.
participants (5)
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Green Dream -
Greg -
I -
Iain R. Learmonth -
Tim Wilson-Brown - teor