[tor-relays] Why MyFamily?

[teor]

Hi Michael,

> On 22 Feb 2020, at 11:30, Roman Mamedov <rm at romanrm.net> wrote:
> 
>>> I already knew that not all of my relays have a correct MyFamily setup
>>> because as long as i am not sure if they will stay i usually dont
>>> include them in MyFamily because it is a pain to edit every torrc
>> 
>> Yes, manually managing MyFamily is a pain with that many relays.
>> It is best to automate it so you don't have to worry about it 
>> no matter how long your relays might run.
> 
> What helps greatly is that the MyFamily string on each relay doesn't have to
> list all OTHER relays, it can list just ALL relays, including that one, i.e.
> simply be the same on all relays. This should vastly simplify any automation
> that you might think of.

Also, it's totally ok to list old relay keys in MyFamily, even if those
relays aren't running any more. Tor clients ignore down relays, so you
can clear out old fingerprints whenever you have time.

Tor also supports "%include (path)" lines in torrcs, which include the
contents of the file at that path.

So you can put all your relay fingerprints in a file, scp it to your relays,
and then issue a HUP (to reload the config).

(If you have logrotate installed, it should issue a HUP every day to
rotate tor's logs. So maybe you can skip that step.)

It's a bit of a pain, I know. I've done it with about 20 relays before.

We'd like to have a better system, maybe with a single shared key
for each family. But that's a long-term plan.

T