[tor-bugs] #28841 [Core Tor/Tor]: Write tool for onion service health assessment (was: Write tool for onion service health assesment)

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#28841: Write tool for onion service health assessment
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 Reporter:  asn                                  |          Owner:  (none)
     Type:  project                              |         Status:
                                                 |  needs_information
 Priority:  Medium                               |      Milestone:  Tor:
                                                 |  unspecified
Component:  Core Tor/Tor                         |        Version:
 Severity:  Normal                               |     Resolution:
 Keywords:  tor-hs reachability research         |  Actual Points:
  network-health                                 |
Parent ID:                                       |         Points:
 Reviewer:                                       |        Sponsor:
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Changes (by arma):

 * keywords:  tor-hs reachability research => tor-hs reachability research
     network-health


Comment:

 1. Agreed, this health assessment tool should be entirely about the
 "within the Tor protocol" side of things. People can use nagios or
 whatever to make sure that their service is running well -- but only if
 the onion protocols are reliable and consistent.

 2. Yes. It's not just timing, and not just success/failure, but another
 piece is trying to identify what went wrong if one of the steps went
 wrong.

 3. Basing it on stem is fine with me. I think the answer might be "no" for
 whether all of this stuff is exposed properly in the control protocol
 though. I think we've had tickets about extending the control protocol in
 that direction open for a very long time. Or maybe nobody even made the
 tickets.

 4. I imagine the first way of using the tool would be that we, the
 developers of the tool, run it consistently against some known-stable
 onion service. The goal would be to look for patterns in the failures. So
 the better the tool can be at identifying where the failure is and why the
 failure is, the more useful it will be. And then the second use of the
 tool would be when people say their onion service isn't working right --
 we can tell them to run the tool and see what it says. Then I could
 imagine a third way, which is somebody sets up a web interface to run the
 tool on behalf of anybody who interacts with the website. Then it would
 become the sort of thing all sorts of people could easily run. But, one
 step at a time -- let's start with that 'first way'. :)

--
Ticket URL: <https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/28841#comment:6>
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