#22203: Should a hup reload the geoip files? --------------------------+--------------------- Reporter: arma | Owner: Type: enhancement | Status: new Priority: Medium | Milestone: Component: Core Tor/Tor | Version: Severity: Normal | Resolution: Keywords: | Actual Points: Parent ID: | Points: Reviewer: | Sponsor: --------------------------+--------------------- Changes (by karsten):
* cc: karsten (added) Comment: I'm not arguing against fixing bugs or writing better tests. But what's the practical value of being able to reload the geoip files? We only ship new geoip files in new releases, and people will need to restart their tor process in order to upgrade to those anyway. I'd guess that only a tiny fraction of operators would want to put in newer geoip files manually and reload their tor process. And those statistics are hardly statistically relevant. So, I was curious how old the geoip files used by relays and bridges are, which is very likely related to how old the tor versions running in the network are. Relays and bridges contain `geoip-db-digest` lines with SHA-1 digests of their geoip file, and we can extract those digests from tor's Git repo. Here are some statistics on the age of geoip files mentioned in descriptors published between January 1, 2017 and May 4, 2017: {{{ # Relays Min. 1st Qu. Median Mean 3rd Qu. Max. "2009-06-03" "2015-03-03" "2015-12-01" "2016-02-15" "2017-01-04" "2017-04-04" # Bridges Min. 1st Qu. Median Mean 3rd Qu. Max. "2009-06-03" "2016-11-03" "2016-12-07" "2016-11-04" "2017-02-08" "2017-04-04" }}} These statistics say that the geoip files used by relays are more than 1 year old on average and those used by bridges a couple of months. (No idea why the difference between the two is so big.) But anyway, it seems like improving support for manually reloading geoip files won't make much of a difference. What we should consider instead is support for downloading signed geoip files from the directory authorities. That will be much more effective. But it's also a lot of work and requires looking into licenses. -- Ticket URL: <https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/22203#comment:2> Tor Bug Tracker & Wiki <https://trac.torproject.org/> The Tor Project: anonymity online _______________________________________________ tor-bugs mailing list tor-bugs@lists.torproject.org https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-bugs