Hello,

Thanks everyone for joining the meetup last saturday!

You can find the meetup notes below.

Thanks!, Gus

---------------------------------------- ## Tor Relay Operator Meetup - June 2022

### Notes

0. Review Agenda

1. Tor Project updates: - Hackweek - https://hackweek.onionize.space/hackweek/talk/#0 https://forum.torproject.net/t/online-hacking-week-at-the-tor-project/3594 - Sysadmin 101 workshop update https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/community/relays/-/issues/36#note_2816664 - should it be repeated with tweaks or maybe other languages, or move on to a 200-level class?

2. The ongoing d(d)os: https://status.torproject.org/issues/2022-06-09-network-ddos/

Ongoing attack for quite a while now. You might have seen the status page we set up:

- https://status.torproject.org/issues/2022-06-09-network-ddos/ - http://hctxrvjzfpvmzh2jllqhgvvkoepxb4kfzdjm6h7egcwlumggtktiftid.onion/hidser... - https://metrics.torproject.org/hidserv-rend-relayed-cells.html

3. Tor 0.4.7.7 (0.4.7.8) update and Congestion control

4. Tor weather GSoC project https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-relays/2022-June/020651.html

5. Relay operator transparency https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/community/team/-/wikis/Expectations-for-Re...

6. Next meetup: we will announce on Tor relays mailing list :)

Note that there will be an in-person relay operator meetup at MCH in the Nederlands, sometime in the July 22-26 range. Stay tuned for details: https://mch2022.org/

7. Q & A

Add your questions here and we will try to answer them all!

- Because of DDoS. Has anyone with their own AS ever used the Team Cymru service? https://team-cymru.com/community-services/utrs/

If the answer from anybody is yes, please share your experience on the tor-relays@ list!

- Is the current DDoS defense (tuning the number of circuits that can be built) actually working? Or is it denying service to honest users too? https://metrics.torproject.org/hidserv-rend-relayed-cells.html

Answer: nobody knows yet! Maybe we are harming performance for honest users? Maybe we are reducing the DDoS or maybe we're not even doing that? We will look further on Monday.

Long term the fix is to implement the proof-of-something proposals: - https://gitweb.torproject.org/torspec.git/tree/proposals/327-pow-over-intro.... -https://gitweb.torproject.org/torspec.git/tree/proposals/331-res-tokens-for-...

It is unclear whether the current DDoS is the same as the one we saw a year ago, where some jerk was trying to knock an onion service off the network and they did it by sending millions of introduction attempts. It seems plausible that it is related / similar.

- DDos: is it getting worse(10Gb/s normally upto 40Gb/s now) http://hctxrvjzfpvmzh2jllqhgvvkoepxb4kfzdjm6h7egcwlumggtktiftid.onion/hidser... - A few weeks ago we had 100Gb/s DDoS against our AS AS208294 in Berlin. Therefore my ixbge driver killing problems.

- It would be good to get some network team people attending these relay operator meetups -- to be able to answer questions and explain what the network team has been doing on the network lately. (In some past ones we had ahf and that was useful, but it doesn't necessarily need to be ahf.)

- What are the links to the reddit discussion where people were surprised to learn that the network health team was reaching out to relay operators to meet them? - https://www.reddit.com/r/TOR/comments/v8nmdp/tor_relay_family_100_servers_bl... - There is also a link on the forum with further discussion: https://forum.torproject.net/t/tor-relay-family-100-servers-blocked-for-refu... - The reality is much more nuanced than those people presented in that reddit discussion. GeKo and gus explain in more detail.

- Is torservers.eu related to torservers.net? No

What is torservers.eu? Seems like a blank page? Must be fake, torservers.net is actual leibi (CCCS)

- Speaking of relay operator meetups, who is going to MCH? - ahf has a Tor talk there. I hear a lot of people are going! - Add your name here if you want. :) - Artikel10 folks will be at MCH! <3

- what About the Gamification project That was Presented 3 months ago?

It was a 3-month internship. We did part of the user experience (UX). Because of timing, we made some mock-ups of the ideas. We don't have capacity to move it forward quite yet but we still have a goal of setting up a gamification portal. Ideally we want to integrate these points into the metrics portal.

- Is there an output posted anywhere? Blog post? Collection of images? Gitlab ticket?

Yes, it's all on gitlab:

findings: - https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/community/relays/-/issues/41 - https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/community/relays/-/issues/39 - https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/community/relays/-/issues/38 mockups: - https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/community/relays/-/issues/37 ideas: - https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/community/relays/-/issues/30

- why isn't the forum promoted as much as other means of communication ? there are many resources on it

When you send mail to the tor-relays@ list, that post gets mirrored onto the forum. So when we share these posts on social media, we share the forum url because it is how people can engage with the thread.

- Can you announce somewhere when there are alerts (on the status page) like a DDoS attack ?

Hm! There are many different topics and audiences in mind for that page, e.g. we use it for saying when gitlab is broken too.

For relay issues, it's unclear what we should do. We should think about it and make a better plan. E.g. if it is about the network, then we should tell tor-relays@ when we add a status entry that has to do with the network.

- Running a relay operator meetup during the weekday, rather than always the weekends?

Eventually we will try this idea yes. But not yet.

On Sat, Jun 25, 2022 at 03:32:09PM -0300, gus wrote:

Hi!

The Tor Relay Operator meetup is happening today and will start soon, at 1900 UTC. I'll open the room 10 minutes before at 18:50 UTC.

Here is our pad with the meetup agenda: https://pad.riseup.net/p/tor-relay-meetup-june-2022-keep

talk soon!, Gus

On Fri, Jun 10, 2022 at 01:54:11PM -0300, gus wrote:

...

Hello,

The next Tor relay operator meetup will happen on Saturday, June 25 @ 1900 UTC.

Where: BigBlueButton - https://tor.meet.coop/gus-og0-x74-dzn

No need for a registration or anything else, just use the room-link above. We will open the room 10 minutes before so you can test your mic setup.

Everyone is free to bring up additional questions or topics at the meeting itself.

Please share with your friends, social media and other mailing lists!

cheers, Gus -- The Tor Project Community Team Lead

-- The Tor Project Community Team Lead

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