[ooni-dev] Call for alpha testing of ooniprobe 2.0.0 series

[Arturo Filastò]

Hello Oonitarians!

We are pleased to announce the public alpha testing of ooniprobe 2.0.0!

Amongst other things this prospect new release adds support for a web based
GUI, allowing you to trigger measurements and directly inspect the results of
them.

It’s mainly designed to be used from raspberry pi based deployments, but
you can also use it to control ooniprobe on desktop.

If you want to jump straight into testing it here is what you have to do:

1) Install the standard requirements for ooniprobe. On debian this can be done
with:
apt-get install -y build-essential libdumbnet-dev libpcap-dev libgeoip-dev libffi-dev python-dev python-pip libssl-dev

2.a) It’s advisable you create a virtual python environment for testing this release and
that you don’t install it system wide.

If you don’t want to do this just skip all the 2.x steps.

You can get python-virtualenv on debian with:

apt-get install python-virtualenv

2.b) Then you should create the virtualenv for testing ooniprobe alpha with:

virtualenv ~/venv-ooniprobe-agent-alpha/

Every time you want to run ooniprobe-agent from the virtualenv remember to first do:

source ~/venv-ooniprobe-agent-alpha/bin/activate

3) Install the alpha build with pip by doing:

pip install https://github.com/TheTorProject/ooni-probe/releases/download/v2.0.0-alpha.2/ooniprobe-2.0.0a2.tar.gz

(this is the signature file for the package: https://github.com/TheTorProject/ooni-probe/releases/download/v2.0.0-alpha.2/ooniprobe-2.0.0a2.tar.gz.asc)

4) Then start the ooniprobe-agent as a system daemon by running:

ooniprobe-agent start

5) You can connect to it by visiting http://localhost:8842/ and you will be greeted by the setup wizard.

You can also find these instructions on the release tag on github:
https://github.com/TheTorProject/ooni-probe/releases/tag/v2.0.0-alpha.2

Some of the major changes in this version are:

* A new deck format that amongst other things supports specifying scheduling
information with a cron-like syntax:
https://github.com/TheTorProject/ooni-probe/issues/571

* New system daemon called ooniprobe-agent that is responsible for exposing
the web UI, but also scheduling recurring operations, such as the update of
inputs, running of the period decks, etc.:
https://github.com/TheTorProject/ooni-probe/issues/576

* Local reports are now also written only in JSON:
https://github.com/TheTorProject/ooni-probe/issues/557

* Informed consent procedure will appear when you first run either ooniprobe or ooniprobe-agent.
This will inform you of the risks associated with running ooniprobe.

Some important changes are:

* oonideckgen is now deprecated, the executable is still there, but it always generates the same
deck.
This is because the new more powerful deck format supports parameters inside of it, so there
is no need to update the paths to the inputs when they get updated.

* ooniresources is also deprecated and the executable actually does nothing, but is left there to
avoid breaking scripts that are relying on it. It will be removed though in future versions entirely.

* ooniprobe by default will not allow you to run measurements unless you read through the risks
document.

Please report any bugs you may find on github at the following address:
https://github.com/TheTorProject/ooni-probe/issues/new?title=[2.0.0%20release]%20Bug%20report

Have fun!

~ Arturo

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