[metrics-team] Bringing back Tor Weather - volunteering developer

[nusenu]

Damian Johnson:
>>> This greatly reduces code complexity
>>
>> using stem to check if a relay is in consensus and running shouldn't
>> increase complexity a lot?
> 
> Nope, it's very simple. On a side note for what it's worth I have a
> 'personal Weather' in the form of a cron task that probes my relay's
> ORPort to see if it's around. This is a tad deeper than simply
> checking if a relay's in the consensus but honestly it all does the
> trick. What Weather did wasn't terribly complicated.

I'd actually love to see service level probing in this service,
which is basically uptimerobot.com's HTTP level functionality test for
the ORPort, but I also believe that having a simple 
consensus check first and available soon is more important than having a 
full blown protocol level service check in the first iteration.

lets start simple and keep in mind that we will want to have this in
future versions? This will also significantly increase the resource requirements
for the machine running the service.

correct me if I'm wrong:
The only reason to want this would be to reduce the detection time
because if your ORPort is no longer working dir auths will not include your
relay in consensus anyway.

The error cases where the ORPort TCP listener 
is still working (tested by something like uptimerobot.com port check every 5 minutes) but the ORPort 
service is disfunctional is probably rather unlikely?

Lets not replicate checks that can already be done with available services like uptimerobot.com or 
are already done by dir auths.

I'm wondering what kind of tests dir auth reachability tests include?
Just a TCP connection test to the ORPort or an actual circuit via that ORPort?


> In case anyone's curious here's my cron task.
> 
> https://gitweb.torproject.org/doctor.git/tree/relay_check.py

thanks for the pointer

-- 
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