[tor-project] Relay operator meetup notes - November 20 2021

[gus]

Hi,

Notes for relay operator meetup, Nov 20 2021, via BBB.

- Torservers.net reanimation
  - Chat says "we're in":
      - Nos Oignons
      - DFRI
      - Digitalcourage
      - applied-privacy.net (would like to learn more about it/discuss
        more)
  - Discussion about what the purpose of TN was/should be (see below)
  - One main goal of torservers umbrella is to separate the network of
    Tor from the development of Tor, so having something like torservers
is important.
  - One useful thing about torservers, from Tor's perspective, is that
    when excited new people show up wanting to run a relay, we can ask
if they're nearby any of the orgs on the partner list and send them
there to get connected.
  - Torservers has RIPE membership, so there's value in being able to
    get/keep/move network blocks too?
  - One of the original features of torservers was to take in funding
    money, and divide it up across organizations that run exits.
  - We could apply for funding to torservers.net -- or apply as any
    other org, and then use the torservers infrastructure for dividing
it properly.
  - torservers also in the past was useful at helping people find
    lawyers in various European countries

- Next Tor activities in CCC rc3
  - https://events.ccc.de/2021/11/10/rc3-2021-meta-cfp/
  - Leibi really wants to see some more Tor *talks* at CCC this year. We
    used to do great talks and it's been years since we did.
  - Roger is not excited to try to do a speech into a webcam -- good Tor
    talks need an actual audience. But discussions, like relay operator
meetups, work a lot better.
  - We could drum up some talk ideas from core Tor people, and also from
    other orgs in the Tor ecosystem. We could even glue together several
Tor mini-talks, starting from the state-of-the-onion content.
  - Talk proposal deadline is *real soon now*.

- Announcements
    - New Tor Forum! https://forum.torproject.net/
    - Removing EOL relays and our EOL policy:
      https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/network-health/team/-/wikis/Relay-EOL-policy
    - v2 onion services deprecation:
      https://forum.torproject.net/t/release-0-3-5-17-0-4-5-11-0-4-6-8-and-0-4-7-2-alpha/148
       - I found it surprising that a tor service containing a single v2
         onion (next to a number of v3 onions) refused to start after
upgrading to a new stable tor release.
          - ^ The user experience in these situations is always tough --
            if your Tor had started, but quietly not actually published
any v2 stuff, you would have been differently surprised. At least this
way you learned that it wasn't going to work.
    - Run a bridge campaign
    https://blog.torproject.org/run-a-bridge-campaign/
    (there's a link to the community portal already, on "how to setup
bridges")
    
- Q&A and open topics:
  - Internship to map and understand the relay operator world, values,
    etc.
    - As a precursor to a gamification project, or improving diversity,
      etc. Read the project: https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/community/team/-/issues/46
    - The internship is starting on December 2021.

  - Debian stable package release process?
    - deb.tpo stable package gets updated when it is included in a
      Debian release
    - The general policy that weasel has is: things only go onto
      deb.torproject.org if they are already in some Debian. So that's
why there's a delay for new stable releases: they need to bake in Debian
sid before they're really in a Debian.
  - Gman999 and others are reviving the TorBSD project, which includes
    making sure relays work well on all of the BSD platforms.

- Activities in 2022
  - Should we do irc meetings, or video calls and chat like this, or
    other?
    - some people like the video angle, because we see real people.
    - next meetup is at CCC r3C.

- RPM packages
- kushal wonders: do any relay operator orgs use the tor rpm?
    - no-one present is using it

Relay orgs present include:
- applied-privacy.net
- artikel10
- Calyx
- CCC Stuttgart
- dfri
- digitalcourage
- f3 netze
- nifty
- nos oignons
- torservers.net
-- 
The Tor Project
Community Team Lead
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