[tor-reports] Damian's Status Report - October 2015

[Damian Johnson]

Hi all! I'm heading home this next weekend for my favorite holiday
(happy pumpkin day!), so sending this a tad early. Personally my
favorite thing about dev meetings are the collaborative projects
they inspire afterward. This month I set aside Nyx in favor of
working with the rest of ya.

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Metrics Collaboration with Karsten
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As part of our devious schemes to benchmark our various descriptor
libraries [1] I wrote a comparison of their capabilities...

  https://stem.torproject.org/tutorials/mirror_mirror_on_the_wall.html#are-there-any-other-parsing-libraries

Been a while since I used Eclipse. Got metrics-lib set up and sent
a minor patch to note its dependencies (#17370). Next need to script
up the benchmark scripts we discussed. Also discussed our CollecTor
index (#17321) and thanks to Karsten it's now a thing!

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List Administration
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During our dev meeting we had several discussions around our email
lists. This month set up tor-project@ [2] to both...

a. Improve transparency a tad by providing a place for our internal
   community to discuss things that don't need to be so secret.

b. Lessen the need to add everyone and their dog to tor-internal@!

Jury's still out on if this'll work, but I hope so. Also followed
up on the thread about trimming tor-internal at . The community seems
pretty split on this so doubt anything will come of it.

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DocTor and Directory Authorities
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* DocTor check for network latency to help surface issues like
  Faravahar's ongoing sluggishness (#17338).

* Took a quick stab at an IPv6 ping for authorities. Presently
  stumped on IPv6 support on cappadocicum (#17298).

* Sending the fingerprint change notifications to bad-relays@
  and bumped its threshold to cut down on false alarms.

* Made a DirAuth wiki to help coordinate tickets. Was worth a
  shot but personally doubt this is gonna go anywhere.

  https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/doc/directory_authority

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Few other noteworthy things were...

* Tor SoP concluded this month with everyone passing! Worked with
  Cristobal to settle on a license for Erebus (#17314) and now in
  the process of moving it to tpo infrastructure.

* Attended TA3M and SeaGL [3] but sadly didn't stick around late
  enough to hear Richard Stallman.

Cheers! -Damian

[1] https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-dev/2015-October/009606.html
[2] https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-project
[3] http://seagl.org/