provide DNS health metrics for tor exit relay operators
https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-dev/2019-February/013655.html
every now and then I'm in contact with relay operators about the "health" of their relays. Following these 1:1 discussions and the discussion on tor-relays@ I'd like to rise this issue with you (the developers) with the goal to help improve relay operations and end user experience in the long term:
Current situation: Arthur Edelstein provides public measurements to tor exit relay operators via his page at: https://arthuredelstein.net/exits/ This page is updated once daily.
the process to use that data looks like this:
- first they watch Arthur's measurement results
- if their failure rate is non-zero they try to tweak/improve/change their setup
- wait for another 24 hours (next measurement)
This is a somewhat suboptimal and slow feedback loop and is probably also less accurate and less valuable data when compared to the data the tor process can provide.
Suggestion for improvement:
Exposes the following DNS status information via tor's controlport to help debug and detect DNS issues on exit relays:
(total numbers since startup)
- amount of DNS queries send to the resolver
- amount of DNS queries send to the resolver due to a RESOLVE request
- DNS queries send to resolver due to a reverse RESOLVE request
- amount of queries that did not result in any answer from the resolver
- breakdown of number of responses by response code (RCODE) https://www.iana.org/assignments/dns-parameters/dns-parameters.xhtml#dns-parameters-6
- max amount of DNS queries send per curcuit
If this causes a significant performance impact this feature should be disabled by default.