[tor-bugs] #16401 [Onionoo]: Fail-fast if file access permissions for out and status prevent an update

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#16401: Fail-fast if file access permissions for out and status prevent an update
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     Reporter:  leeroy       |      Owner:
         Type:  enhancement  |     Status:  new
     Priority:  normal       |  Milestone:
    Component:  Onionoo      |    Version:
   Resolution:               |   Keywords:
Actual Points:               |  Parent ID:
       Points:               |
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Comment (by leeroy):

 Sure I'll look into it. This happened when I tried to transfer a backup to
 a new instance of Onionoo running branch-task-13600. I just forgot to
 recursively change owner on out and status and found the server flooding
 the logs and rotating over dozens of log files.

 I pretty much do the same thing for backups. Because I've been testing
 multiple server versions I usually try to delay importing the latest
 recent data. Wait until I'm between updates, tar.bz2 the folders, then
 transfer them elsewhere. I could probably make my life easier by doing all
 this as the onionoo user and using a location which they can access.

 __On a related issue:__ By my estimation, each month adds ~460MB and ~64K
 uncompressed files (in the past 1.5 years). So a fully deployed server can
 be expected to have to backup ~40GB. A lot of small files too, so lots of
 IO. Should Onionoo include functionality for backup/restore? This might
 work better with an hourly updater + archives, and could be done using
 java.util.zip or apache.commons.compress.

 __On another related issue__: Should I make a ticket for having the server
 stop trying to process the update if a certain number of errors occur? If
 the server keeps trying to update this might make a (hardware) failure
 worse. Maybe the server should stop trying to update if encountering many
 errors. The server admin will get a notice somehow (if they configured it
 right) so they probably have other things to worry about at this point.

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Ticket URL: <https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/16401#comment:2>
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