[tor-relays] Tor Relay Operators Needs

[Eran Sandler]

Hi everyone,

My name is Eran Sandler and I'm the Operator of tor4thepeople1
(98F44299592FC31FD3F2F8969D27374D00E96B9B) and tor4thepeople3
(CEACA34874EAD103D27CA6A7650B16112F12B209) - tor4thepeople2 had to go away,
unfortunately.

I also developed the gonionoo (https://github.com/erans/gonionoo) an Go
wrapper around the Onionoo API.

I've been running various tor relays and exit nodes since Sep/2015.

Being a software developer by trade I've been thinking about projects and
services that might help Tor Relay Operators and Tor in general and have a
few ideas I wanted to pass along and see if anyone sticks.

A few of the most notable ones are:

   - *Tor Weather Replacement* - ever since Tor Weather went down I've
   found that I actually miss it. It doesn't happen often that my relays are
   down but it does happen from time to time and in the past Tor Weather
   really helped get notified.

   A few things I thought about adding in addition to "Your node is down"
   alert are:
   - Node version is too old
      - New versions of Tor that are relevant to you are available etc
      - Sends node stats every given interval

      - *Free domain name for every Tor node operator who wants it*.

   A while back I purchased torexitnode.net and I wanted to develop a
   system that, upon verifying a running node (send an email to the published
   Email address of a node and verify its running) - will give a subdomain
   under torexitnode.net. I'm currently using it for
   tor4thepeople1.torexitnode.net and tor4thepeople3.torexitnode.net.

   I find that it makes things easier to explain when that's the node name.
   If you can get your hosting service to provide you with an updated reverse
   DNS for your IP address and point it to a subdomain of torexitnode.net
   it make it very clear that this is a Tor exit node.

   - *System to provide tor exit node verification*. Given a pre-registered
   app and callback and a fingerprint of a node it will find the Email of the
   operator and email a unique link. When that link is clicked a callback will
   be made to the preregistered URL - allowing a developer to verify that a
   certain node operator is truely the one accessing the service. That is
   actually needed for both of the services mentioned above.

   - *Simple package to run a webserver + customized tor exit node notice
   page* - similar to what I configured for
   http://tor4thepeople1.torexitnode.net. It's very useful and if we can
   get a super basic web server that only serves this page and would be easy
   to install (maybe even bundle with Tor) + let's encrypt integration (to
   serve it under SSL) it would provide great benefit to all operators.


If you have additional ideas and or thoughts about the above projects or
other projects please let me know.

Looking forward to your thoughts.

Thanks,
Eran
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