[tor-relays] [Event] Tor relay operator meetup - June 25th @ 1900 UTC

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Hello,

Thanks everyone for joining the meetup last saturday!

You can find the meetup notes below.

Thanks!,
Gus

Tor Relay Operator Meetup - June 2022

Notes

  1. Review Agenda

  2. Tor Project updates:

  3. The ongoing d(d)os:
    Network DDoS | Tor Project status

Ongoing attack for quite a while now. You might have seen the status page we set up:

  1. Tor 0.4.7.7 (0.4.7.8) update and Congestion control

  2. Tor weather GSoC project
    [tor-relays] [New Initiative] Tor Weather: Improving the Tor Weather

  3. Relay operator transparency
    Expectations for Relay Operators · Wiki · The Tor Project / Community / Team · GitLab

  4. Next meetup: we will announce on Tor relays mailing list :slight_smile:

Note that there will be an in-person relay operator meetup at MCH in the
Nederlands, sometime in the July 22-26 range. Stay tuned for details:

  1. Q & A

Add your questions here and we will try to answer them all!

If the answer from anybody is yes, please share your experience on
the tor-relays@ list!

  • Is the current DDoS defense (tuning the number of circuits that can be
    built) actually working? Or is it denying service to honest users too?
    Onion Services – Tor Metrics

Answer: nobody knows yet! Maybe we are harming performance for
honest users? Maybe we are reducing the DDoS or maybe we’re not even
doing that? We will look further on Monday.

Long term the fix is to implement the proof-of-something proposals:

It is unclear whether the current DDoS is the same as the one we saw
a year ago, where some jerk was trying to knock an onion service off
the network and they did it by sending millions of introduction
attempts. It seems plausible that it is related / similar.

  • DDos: is it getting worse(10Gb/s normally upto 40Gb/s now)
    http://hctxrvjzfpvmzh2jllqhgvvkoepxb4kfzdjm6h7egcwlumggtktiftid.onion/hidserv-rend-relayed-cells.html

  • A few weeks ago we had 100Gb/s DDoS against our AS AS208294 in Berlin.
    Therefore my ixbge driver killing problems.

  • It would be good to get some network team people attending these relay
    operator meetups – to be able to answer questions and explain what
    the network team has been doing on the network lately. (In some past
    ones we had ahf and that was useful, but it doesn’t necessarily need to
    be ahf.)

  • What are the links to the reddit discussion where people were
    surprised to learn that the network health team was reaching out to
    relay operators to meet them?

  • Is torservers.eu related to torservers.net? No

What is torservers.eu? Seems like a blank page? Must be fake,
torservers.net is actual leibi (CCCS)

  • Speaking of relay operator meetups, who is going to MCH?

    • ahf has a Tor talk there. I hear a lot of people are going!
    • Add your name here if you want. :slight_smile:
    • Artikel10 folks will be at MCH! <3

  • what About the Gamification project That was Presented 3 months ago?

It was a 3-month internship. We did part of the user experience
(UX). Because of timing, we made some mock-ups of the ideas. We
don’t have capacity to move it forward quite yet but we still have a
goal of setting up a gamification portal. Ideally we want to integrate
these points into the metrics portal.

  • Is there an output posted anywhere? Blog post? Collection of images?
    Gitlab ticket?

Yes, it’s all on gitlab:

findings:

Why isn’t the forum promoted as much as other means of communication? there are many resources on it.

When you send mail to the tor-relays@ list, that post gets mirrored onto the forum. So when we share these posts on social media, we share the forum url because it is how people can engage with the thread.

  • Can you announce somewhere when there are alerts (on the status page) like a DDoS attack ?

Hm! There are many different topics and audiences in mind for that page,
e.g. we use it for saying when gitlab is broken too.

For relay issues, it’s unclear what we should do. We should think about
it and make a better plan. E.g. if it is about the network, then we
should tell tor-relays@ when we add a status entry that has to do with
the network.

  • Running a relay operator meetup during the weekday, rather than always
    the weekends?

Eventually we will try this idea yes. But not yet.

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