Re: [tor-relays] tor network loses ~50 relays/day due to bw auth problem
On Mon, Jun 01, 2015 at 11:02:53AM -0500, Tom Ritter wrote: Hrm. So this gets into the inner workings of the bwauth system which is... complicated.[0] Honestly, I'm not actually sure how the individual data from the different bwauths is combined into a single value for the consensus. The weight in the consensus is the median of the bwauth votes. (That design aims to best resist manipulation of the weight by a small number of bwauths.) I'm not sure what the answer is for your problem, but I'm beginning to wonder if the general approach to this problem is There should be a bwauth debugging mechanism similar to https://consensus-health.torproject.org/ or (the unimplemented) proposal 164. I don't know if said mechanism would be a component of atlas/globe or an entirely separate site, but if the bwauths exported their hourly files, and this hypothetical tool aggregated that data, it may help figure these things out. It might give an answer like moria spazzed out and undervoted me, let me wait until it scans me again. Yes, I'd love to have something like this. Once upon a time I asked for us to export more of the bwauth internals: https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/2532 But at the time Mike decided that the intermediate bwauth numbers weren't useful enough to export. Another ticket you might enjoy is: https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/2394 I think ultimately we need somebody to simplify the bwauth design as much as possible (but no more), and then we can start assessing its output to see how it compares to reality. In parallel, or maybe instead, we might want more work on bandwidth estimation algorithms that are resilient to cheating. Right now the bwauth results can be gamed, and making them harder to game is an open research area. Some research groups have been working on it, and I look forward to some of their papers going public. But none of the papers that I've seen so far are perfect designs, so don't set your expectations too high. :) But all of that said, just visualizing the various Measured= lines by each of the bwauths might be a great start, and this can be done with the published votes as-is: http://freehaven.net/~arma/moria1-v3-status-votes --Roger ___ tor-relays mailing list tor-relays@lists.torproject.org https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-relays
Re: [tor-relays] tor network loses ~50 relays/day due to bw auth problem
Hi all, thanks for your answer and the point to the BwAuth specs, Tom - I’ll definitely get into that, or at least try to. The proposal sounds interesting and I think it would be a good thing to have the whole voting mechanism a bit more transparent. But I guess that might not happen in the near future as it seems to require some bit of work at the back-end… On 01.06.2015, at 18:56, torelay tore...@ruggedinbox.com wrote: I set my bridge up using the guide at https://www.sky-ip.org/tutorials.html https://www.sky-ip.org/tutorials.html and I have a steady flow of connections definitely visible via tor-arm. Thanks for the suggestion! I checked my setup with the tutorial and while I didn’t know that one, I did everything shown there when I was originally setting up the relay. So unfortunately, that doesn’t solve my problem :( Meanwhile, my consensus weight increased again and I’m now at about the level I was two weeks ago. So maybe Nick was right when he said Right now, if you want to know the reason why your server was listed a certain way in the Tor directory, the following steps are recommended: - Wait a while, see if things get better. :) Best regards, Jannis___ tor-relays mailing list tor-relays@lists.torproject.org https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-relays
Re: [tor-relays] tor network loses ~50 relays/day due to bw auth problem
Hrm. So this gets into the inner workings of the bwauth system which is... complicated.[0] Honestly, I'm not actually sure how the individual data from the different bwauths is combined into a single value for the consensus. I'm not sure what the answer is for your problem, but I'm beginning to wonder if the general approach to this problem is There should be a bwauth debugging mechanism similar to https://consensus-health.torproject.org/ or (the unimplemented) proposal 164. I don't know if said mechanism would be a component of atlas/globe or an entirely separate site, but if the bwauths exported their hourly files, and this hypothetical tool aggregated that data, it may help figure these things out. It might give an answer like moria spazzed out and undervoted me, let me wait until it scans me again. -tom [0] https://gitweb.torproject.org/torflow.git/tree/NetworkScanners/BwAuthority/README.spec.txt [1] https://gitweb.torproject.org/torspec.git/tree/proposals/164-reporting-server-status.txt On 31 May 2015 at 17:31, Jannis Wiese m...@janniswiese.com wrote: Hi operators, I believe especially the DirAuth/bwauth operators are working on this, but I would like to understand the ongoing issues. On my relay (8827944C4BDCBDAC9079803F47823403C11A9B7A), I see a decline in consensus weight fraction basically since May 14 (that's where the first drop in weight fraction occurred) and the same in traffic of course. The connections went down by more than 50% from 1500-1600 to now about 700 (total values). I did notice the strange peak in traffic yesterday, but it's now back to low levels. My relay is of course working nowhere near capacity (I have set up a RelayBandwithRate of 2MB and a Burst of 5MB) and I hope you understand that's a bit frustrating for me. At the moment I just see urras missing from the consensus and the measured entries of longclaw are quite a bit off the chart (I've subscribed to the consensus-health mailing list) - is that all what you need to have the tor traffic not distributed consistently (at least from my point of view) any more? Most importantly: Can I do something to help? Cheers, Jannis ___ tor-relays mailing list tor-relays@lists.torproject.org https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-relays ___ tor-relays mailing list tor-relays@lists.torproject.org https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-relays
Re: [tor-relays] tor network loses ~50 relays/day due to bw auth problem
Hi operators, I believe especially the DirAuth/bwauth operators are working on this, but I would like to understand the ongoing issues. On my relay (8827944C4BDCBDAC9079803F47823403C11A9B7A), I see a decline in consensus weight fraction basically since May 14 (that’s where the first drop in weight fraction occurred) and the same in traffic of course. The connections went down by more than 50% from 1500-1600 to now about 700 (total values). I did notice the strange peak in traffic yesterday, but it’s now back to low levels. My relay is of course working nowhere near capacity (I have set up a RelayBandwithRate of 2MB and a Burst of 5MB) and I hope you understand that's a bit frustrating for me. At the moment I just see urras missing from the consensus and the measured entries of longclaw are quite a bit off the chart (I’ve subscribed to the consensus-health mailing list) - is that all what you need to have the tor traffic not distributed consistently (at least from my point of view) any more? Most importantly: Can I do something to help? Cheers, Jannis signature.asc Description: Message signed with OpenPGP using GPGMail ___ tor-relays mailing list tor-relays@lists.torproject.org https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-relays
Re: [tor-relays] tor network loses ~50 relays/day due to bw auth problem
On Wed, May 20, 2015 at 04:13:57PM -0500, Tom Ritter wrote: Right now Tor has two new BWAuths spinning up, one of which will hopefully be included in the vote this week or weekend. And, it looks like Tom's bwauth data is now being used by maatuska. So I expect this will be good news for many, though not all, of the relay operators who have been part of this thread. You can investigate the individual votes about your relay by looking at the copies of the votes that moria1 exports each hour: http://freehaven.net/~arma/moria1-v3-status-votes (Be aware that while the file is used to be small, it's now up to 28 megabytes. The network sure has been growing.) --Roger ___ tor-relays mailing list tor-relays@lists.torproject.org https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-relays
Re: [tor-relays] tor network loses ~50 relays/day due to bw auth problem
GIGGITY GIGGITY GOO!!! It appears as of this morning, 3 of my relays are now reporting something better than 20, in the upper hundreds. My other one that started working the week before is now chomping along it's merry way. So I will turn the 3 back on to exit-relays. Matt Speak Freely ___ tor-relays mailing list tor-relays@lists.torproject.org https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-relays
Re: [tor-relays] tor network loses ~50 relays/day due to bw auth problem
Hey, thank’s a lot my relay is now also able to support Tor. After over 2 weeks consensus weight is raising! Thank’s to all who helped to fix this bug… Best regards, Marcus -- Mein öffentlicher Schlüssel (S/MIME) ist hier verfügbar: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/1c6mccutvv7osq8/AAD66cjh4kmgE5d5xLgQjM_0a?dl=1 Am 25.05.2015 um 15:18 schrieb Speak Freely when2plus2...@riseup.net: GIGGITY GIGGITY GOO!!! It appears as of this morning, 3 of my relays are now reporting something better than 20, in the upper hundreds. My other one that started working the week before is now chomping along it's merry way. So I will turn the 3 back on to exit-relays. Matt Speak Freely ___ tor-relays mailing list tor-relays@lists.torproject.org https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-relays ___ tor-relays mailing list tor-relays@lists.torproject.org https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-relays
Re: [tor-relays] tor network loses ~50 relays/day due to bw auth problem
I thank you, Tom. I lack all of the cited qualifications - now I know. :) Matt Speak Freely ___ tor-relays mailing list tor-relays@lists.torproject.org https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-relays
Re: [tor-relays] tor network loses ~50 relays/day due to bw auth problem
To be a bwauth you have to be a dirauth, if the bwauth draft spec I read was correct. But how do you become a dirauth? The addresses are hardcoded into Tor, so it's not like I could just spin up a dirauth in an evening and let the network do the rest. There's got to be more to it. I was interested in hearing the response as well, so... Bump. Jannis Wiese: What does it take to run a bwauth and/or dir auth? I would be happy to help, if I can. Jannis Matt Speak Freely ___ tor-relays mailing list tor-relays@lists.torproject.org https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-relays
Re: [tor-relays] tor network loses ~50 relays/day due to bw auth problem
On Wednesday, 20 May 2015, Speak Freely when2plus2...@riseup.net wrote: To be a bwauth you have to be a dirauth, if the bwauth draft spec I read was correct. But how do you become a dirauth? The addresses are hardcoded into Tor, so it's not like I could just spin up a dirauth in an evening and let the network do the rest. There's got to be more to it. You don't need to *be* a DirAuth, but you do need to work closely with a DirAuth to have them use your data to vote. Being a DirAuth requires an incredible amount of trust by the community, established operational skills, and usually a solid public reputation. Right now Tor has two new BWAuths spinning up, one of which will hopefully be included in the vote this week or weekend. One of the things we're finding through the process is that the torflow scripts are a little buggy. So far they've been buggy in obvious ways, but the worry is that they're buggy in non-obvious way - that some change in the dependencies since they've been written are causing wrong results. We're not sure if that's the case yet. If it is, we will hopefully be getting an indication soon, and will want to work on debugging it, possible with the affected relay operators. The code is at https://gitweb.torproject.org/torflow.git/tree/NetworkScanners/BwAuthority While reviewing and testing the code may be useful, I would caution against everyone spinning up a BWAuth though. By it's very nature, it uses a lot of bandwidth. I don't know if it would put strain on the network if suddenly 16 BWAuths were running instead of 6. (Maybe someone better at the math part of the network bandwidth would have an idea.) -tom ___ tor-relays mailing list tor-relays@lists.torproject.org https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-relays
Re: [tor-relays] tor network loses ~50 relays/day due to bw auth problem
Hi all, Wanted to provide an update (even if it's not as good news as I hoped to give) because I know this is a very frustrating issue for everyone. At a high level, the bwauth scripts segment the network into four segments ranked by relay speed, and measure each of these segments. They are 0-10, 10-40[0], 30-60, 60-100 (so the top 10% of relays by speed, and so on.) After 26 hours[1], the first scanner we added is currently at: Segment 1: Completed, looped a couple times Segment 2: 34.2 of the 10-40 Segment 3: 46.5 of the 30-60 Segment 4: 77.4 out of the 60-100 This isn't very encouraging - it's slow going. Two of things that were just brainstormed in #tor-dev were: 1) Increasing the number of scanners tended to overwhelm the tor instance that supported these scanners, so we want to try doubling the scanners *and* the tors. Hopefully this will let us work our way through the list of relays faster. 2) We want to look at the possibility of relays moving around in the percentiles in each consensus, getting unlucky, and not being measured; potentially fixable by pinning a relay to a percentile, and then when we get all the way through a segment, unpin it, get that segment from the latest consensus, and restart. This may result in a relay being pinned into scanner#2, scanner#1 completes, measures the relay, then scanner#2 measures it... that wouldn't be so bad, double measuring is better than not measuring. When torflow was written over four years ago, there may have been a good reason it didn't work this way, and we need to see if we can re-reason out what that was. So we are working on identifying the subtler issues and seeing if we can fix them, in addition to just adding more of the same. -tom [2] [0] The 10-40 overlap is a bug we just found. [1] Well, more like 50 hours, but the first 24 were lost because of a breaking change in a python point release [2] (Most of this is aagbsn's knowledge, I'm just transcribing it.) ___ tor-relays mailing list tor-relays@lists.torproject.org https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-relays
Re: [tor-relays] tor network loses ~50 relays/day due to bw auth problem
-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA512 Roger Dingledine: Yep. moria1's bwauth seems to be working fine, so I'm the only one paying attention to the thread here sounds alarming if people operating tor's key infrastructure do not care (or have not enough time to care) https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-consensus-health/2015-May/005774.html: WARNING: The following directory authorities are not reporting bandwidth scanner results: tor26 If one more bw auth goes down, all relays will get the unmeasured flag, because the threshold of 3 votes is no longer reached, is that understanding of the spec correct? current stats: 2015-05-19 19:00: 1367 unmeasured (lost ~1000 relays and 10GBit/s bw since 2015-05-01) -BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE- iQIcBAEBCgAGBQJVW6F8AAoJEFv7XvVCELh0jpUP/1lCuruaXhUD2lqMBP4LKY2x Y63uP0UUUqQZBTlO69kNw8pPLI8c89eB7IDzyZDtlfqk7FNnhp9W1gC8lHmb7pg0 mgYuvrdbsIlQLVsDDCJHGsib1YDja/EFgcTp3mRwT4mL59KdSIySShqGDShVTVPV JBySVIgrq0w2U3GcSwe7oSA5/HA+b1Zuouj9xOqGQRjvRnsxnubGmghP9e0Paq0Y uK6mwZ16RrjADxLl6qVDoCA0bKj2j4L8t7j5bv4fs7oOFQU90FPEg/NQZChVxSZ9 ylJK9O3tOGXUEI6L/OMtt0gt/Ra2AkkWUri6GzZ5q0uuYqF2objQUzDNA0wFyCWi uEjqR99wyYTUMSUhWbZoVKJ2tJ3nMaX032aIog0f9mwxeMgRxy4XwK6spdobmkGN yLxj6Pzipogk9hAKRDKA5EvcID58B9ML6+dmOdguH3TyY+PaKNfe7We2VXZ4w1Ll izi1qBrTjCt9KnKEknWyqHbTbo900PViDS4/z8M63vV7Q6PwqU4gLJvaAEAx3yxk KVqRcay6yhEsa1TW1eaTxB+eAfSM/2xNlJQYYLEpSvQc8WKETapdBfI6P6Bu4bEd ASgpz8wd4x5l/7IzjPS4LmsRuA6WU46GB7ZTAQ7e75gqkzAUPF9MhFFlEj5e2a/X v0chVqpt2K8uXjRXhWxC =2r1d -END PGP SIGNATURE- ___ tor-relays mailing list tor-relays@lists.torproject.org https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-relays
Re: [tor-relays] tor network loses ~50 relays/day due to bw auth problem
Hi Roger, On 19.05.2015, at 23:01, Roger Dingledine a...@mit.edu wrote: Well, we are working on a variety of approaches now for fixing it. Some in the short term (get more bwauths, fix bugs), some in the long term (make and deploy better design for computing weights). What does it take to run a bwauth and/or dir auth? I would be happy to help, if I can. Jannis signature.asc Description: Message signed with OpenPGP using GPGMail ___ tor-relays mailing list tor-relays@lists.torproject.org https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-relays
Re: [tor-relays] tor network loses ~50 relays/day due to bw auth problem
On Tue, May 19, 2015 at 08:47:56PM +, nusenu wrote: sounds alarming if people operating tor's key infrastructure do not care (or have not enough time to care) Well, we are working on a variety of approaches now for fixing it. Some in the short term (get more bwauths, fix bugs), some in the long term (make and deploy better design for computing weights). https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-consensus-health/2015-May/005774.html: WARNING: The following directory authorities are not reporting bandwidth scanner results: tor26 If one more bw auth goes down, all relays will get the unmeasured flag, because the threshold of 3 votes is no longer reached, is that understanding of the spec correct? No, I believe if there are only two dir auths who express weight opinions in their votes, then the group collectively backs off to using self-advertised weights. current stats: 2015-05-19 19:00: 1367 unmeasured (lost ~1000 relays and 10GBit/s bw since 2015-05-01) We also took some steps in the past few weeks to cut out extra tiny relays. It would be good for somebody to track a list of what those events were. I don't mean to say that we lost zero relays due to the above issue; but I think an unknown number of them are better explained by other events in the network. --Roger ___ tor-relays mailing list tor-relays@lists.torproject.org https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-relays
