[tor-talk] Node Down and Old Version Notifications

[Chris Dagdigian]

I think someone else is already doing this -- at least for down nodes

I run a small exit node and when the box gets OOM and hangs I get an 
email with the subject: "[Tor Weather] Node Down!"

And that has a URL about the maintainer and code:

The original Tor Weather was decommissioned by the Tor project and this 
replacement is now maintained independently. You can learn more here:
https://github.com/thingless/torweather/blob/master/README.md




> Kevin Gallagher <mailto:kcg295 at nyu.edu>
> December 17, 2018 at 3:58 PM
> Hello everyone,
>
> The other day I got a really helpful e-mail. It seems a person named 
> Paul wrote a program to check the PGP key servers and e-mail people to 
> let them know that their keys are about to expire. After updating my 
> key I thought about how an approach like this on the Tor consensus 
> could be used to notify people when their Tor node goes down, or when 
> their version of Tor is out of date and therefore their node becomes 
> "not recommended."
>
> Though such a tool might be useful, I wonder if it is in the spirit of 
> Tor. I know that a lot of people obfuscate their e-mail when running a 
> Tor node (using AT instead of @, etc.), and I'm sure part of the 
> reason this is being done is because they don't want to be contacted 
> by bots. However, maybe they would want to be notified if their node 
> went down or was out of date.
>
> Are there any thoughts on whether or not a tool like this is a good 
> idea? If people think it's in the spirit of Tor I'm willing to sit 
> down and try to write it up.
>
> Thanks,
>
> Kevin
>