[tor-dev] Using the consensus-health web page to debug the Tor network

[Karsten Loesing]

On 9/25/13 6:43 PM, Damian Johnson wrote:
>> I disagree.  It's useful information to know if some authorities don't
>> assign flags or assign extra flags to a relay.  That can help explain
>> why the relay sometimes gets the flag if some of the authorities don't
>> vote.  Or in case of Named/Unnamed and Exit/BadExit, the flags contained
>> in votes can help explain why a relay gets the Named or Exit flag.
>> There may be more examples.  Sure, this is like debug information, and
>> not many relay operators will understand what's going on there.  But
>> saying that the information contained in the table is not useful is not
>> correct.
> 
> If we were to surface flag votes on a one-off basis then we should do
> so in Atlas. Actually, it would be pretty slick if hovering your mouse
> over the flags showed the votes for each authority. I still disagree
> that any except a vanishingly small group will find this useful, but
> if this is a use case we want to support then Atlas is the spot.

Moved this discussion to ticket #9778:

https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/9778#comment:5

>> Consensuses and votes contain these lines:
>>
>> valid-after 2013-09-25 13:00:00
>> fresh-until 2013-09-25 14:00:00
>> valid-until 2013-09-25 16:00:00
> 
> Thanks! Added a note to the ticket. It'll be a while before I can
> implement it, but definitely on my list of things I'd like to do.

Sounds good.

>> Not sure if that's going to swim.  Is it really a good use of Roger's
>> time to write or adapt Python scripts?  I guess he can answer that
>> better than I (though I'm not sure it's a good use of his time to follow
>> this thread ;)).  However, we shouldn't be developing this tool just for
>> Roger, because hopefully other people care about debugging the network,
>> too.  Just imagine what Tor devs would want to use whenever somebody
>> shows up on #tor and asks why their relay doesn't have this or that
>> flag, and imagine what's the easiest way to share results with the relay
>> operator.
> 
> Is debugging the tor network a good use of Roger's time? I can't
> answer that. That said, if Roger is trying to answer exotic questions
> like "i wanted to know how many relays had a Running flag from those
> two authorities and no Running flag from any others" then I can tell
> you that scripting is the right answer. Not a huge table.
> 
> Learning to script both empowers Roger to solve harder problems and do
> so more efficiently. If he wants to answer the questions like the one
> above then he should either learn to script or ask me to do it.

Works for me, in particular if you're going to be around to help with
the scripting.

Roger, does this work for you, too?

All the best,
Karsten