[tor-project] Monthly Status Report from irl

[Iain R. Learmonth]

Hi All,

This is my monthly status report for work complete during May 2021.

This month saw the releases of metrics-lib 2.16.0 and CollecTor 1.17.0. The new CollecTor release includes the updated metrics-lib, and has now been deployed to both the Tor Metrics CollecTor instances. During the deployments, I took the opportunity to fully document the deployment and upgrade procedure, and document common error conditions that may appear in the log files.

I refreshed my memory on how the GeoIP lookups are performed within Onionoo, and have also been reviewing patches that exist in the GitLab to be included in an updated Onionoo release. I am planning to upload the GeoIP data files to Maven Central, and use that JAR in Onionoo, rather than including the files directly as this will also support Orbot and other Android applications embedding Tor in using those files.

Proposal 328's implementation (Make Relays Report When They Are Overloaded) has caused issues with bridge descriptor sanitisation. My first task this month is to get the patch to support the new relay descriptor lines into CollecTor and get that deployed so that we do not find ourselves discarding all bridge descriptors. (CollecTor will only archive those it knows it is safe to archive, which do not contain lines it does not know about).

Towards the end of the month, CollecTor experienced disk space issues. These were resolved with the help of the sysadmin team and the system is now running smoothly again, with no data lost or corrupted.

Finally, I have been around in Matrix/IRC to answer Metrics questions and on occasion to provide a little end-user support in #tor. I've been attending the weekly network health meetings and will continue to do so. If you've got any questions about anything I'm working on, just send me an email or chat on Matrix/IRC.

Thanks,
Iain.