[metrics-team] IPv6 votes and consensus synthetic flags

Iain Learmonth irl at torproject.org
Thu Dec 7 23:15:48 UTC 2017


Hi All,

For context, this email is prompted by this commit:

https://gitweb.torproject.org/karsten/metrics-web.git/commit/?h=tasks-24218-23761&id=57c58b5f1b099ac61e09169661a19b8c4a82984f

We currently have synthetic flags in consensus-health and in Relay
Search relating to IPv6. They are not amazingly consistent in my opinion.

The main distinction between the consensus-health flags and the Relay
Search flags is that the consensus-health flags are included in votes
whereas Relay Search bases its synthetic flags on the consensus.

I'm becoming increasingly convinced that this distinction should go
away. For all other flags, there is no distinction between the flag in
the votes and the flag in the consensus. consensus-health even lists
ReachableIPv6 in the consensus column.

In the patch above, there is a distinction between "announced" and
"confirmed". I think perhaps this distinction should be between
"announced" and "reachable". This also gives two good properties from
which to generate synthetic flags:

Announced | Reachable | Votes           | Consensus
----------+-----------+-----------------+----------------
No        | -         | -               | -
Yes       | No        | UnreachableIPv6 | UnreachableIPv6
Yes       | Yes       | ReachableIPv6   | ReachableIPv6

The description of the "exiting" property in the above commit matches
exactly the semantics of the existing Relay Search synthetic flag "IPv6
Exit" and so I think that's OK. consensus-health currently does not
generate a flag with similar meanings.

Relay Search currently does not have any vote information, as Onionoo
currently does not have this information either. Relay Search will
therefore only be able to generate UnreachableIPv6 flags based on the
diff between the relay descriptor and the consensus (IIUC).

Is there something I'm missing here that means that we shouldn't unify
these flags?

Thanks,
Iain.

-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 512 bytes
Desc: OpenPGP digital signature
URL: <http://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/metrics-team/attachments/20171207/cd75e161/attachment.sig>


More information about the metrics-team mailing list