[tor-project] Monthly status report for irl

[Iain R. Learmonth]

Hi All,

This is my monthly status report for work complete during August 2021. This will be my last status report for this contract, please direct all queries about metrics tooling going forward to the network health team.

I released and deployed updates for CollecTor to archive bridgestrap data. This is currently disabled until the bridgestrap results can be declared stable by the anti-censorship team. If you're interested in following this, see:

  https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/bridgestrap/-/issues/25

I completed an update to Onionoo that reads in this data from CollecTor and will use the bridgestrap test result to override the Running flag from the bridge authority, such that bridges with their OR ports hidden do not always show as offline, instead using the reachability of their PT port.

I have spent time focussed on getting hiro up to speed on working with the Metrics codebases. During August, we saw releases of metrics-lib and Onionoo, including work on the overload-* lines in server/extra-info descriptors, that should give new insights into bottlenecks in the network.

Finally, I have been around in Matrix/IRC to answer Metrics questions and on occasion to provide a little end-user support in #tor.

Thanks,
Iain.