[tor-bugs] #14354 [Tor]: Figure out a good solution for all the dirauth scripts
Tor Bug Tracker & Wiki
blackhole at torproject.org
Sun Jan 25 21:37:46 UTC 2015
#14354: Figure out a good solution for all the dirauth scripts
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Reporter: asn | Owner:
Type: defect | Status: new
Priority: normal | Milestone: Tor: 0.2.???
Component: Tor | Version:
Keywords: tor-dirauth | Actual Points:
Parent ID: | Points:
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From talking to Sebastian and weasel, it seems to me that dirauth
operators are having trouble sysadmining all these little dirauth scripts.
Furthermore, many of the dirauth operators are not even running scripts
like bw measurement, because of the pain of setting them up and supporting
them.
With #9321 introducing another script, and with #8244 requiring yet
another script. And with the peerflow system that might replace the bw
auths, it seems that we will need to find a solution to this problem.
Otherwise, only 1-2 dirauth ops (that are also Tor devs) will run each
script, which is not good.
Unfortunately, I don't have a very good solution to propose here.
The obviously bad idea would be to bake all these scripts into
little-t-tor. But this scales terribly, and we all have hopes for making
Tor more modular and this will just be a step backwards.
Another idea that is still not very good but maybe more implementable, is
to revisit all these scripts and make them work with minimal setup effort.
Then make debian packages that auto-work for all of them (or just a big
meta-package), and ask dirauth operators to install them. Then assign
someone to be the '''maintainer''' of all those scripts so that they take
care of them when they break or when dirauth ops need help. However, it's
unclear how many of these scripts can just auto-work without manual setup
or how much Debian hackery that would involve, or whether all dirauth ops
use APT-based systems.
At the same time we could make it more clear which dirauths are running
which scripts, so that we can incorporate it as part of consensus health
and warn dirauths ops that are not running certain scripts or have not
updated them. Also, the "make Tor architecture more modular" giga-project
might help here, since we could define a custom interface for all these
scripts, and make it easier to plug them in Tor without torrc hacks. Also,
maybe simply having a nice wiki page with all the current scripts and
'''good INSTALL instructions''' might actually be effective.
What else could we do here that would make dirauths more happy?
--
Ticket URL: <https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/14354>
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