Network Health Team

PageOutline

About us

Welcome to the Network Health page! There are several people in the Tor community taking care of the network's health.

The five areas that we focus on are:

(1) track community standards about what makes a good relay

• publish up-to-date expectations for relay operators
• set best practices for how to set relay families
• detect and resolve bad relays
  • exitmap, sybil detection, hsdir traps

(2) anomaly analysis / network health engineer [with network team]

• establish baselines of expected network behavior
• look for and resolve denial of service issues
• track connectivity issues between relays
• look for relays hitting resource limits

(3) make sure usage/growth stats are collected and accurate

• track network performance, relay diversity by various metrics
• count users [with network team and metrics team]
• monitor bridge growth and usage [with censorship team]

(4) relay advocacy [with community team]

• maintain docs for setting up and running relays and bridges
• grow a cohesive community of relay operators so they have peers
  • keep relays on the right tor versions
• relaunch a gamification / badge system for lauding good relay progress
• strengthen relationships with non-profit orgs that run relays
• help companies that want to offset their tor network load

(5) maintain the components of the network

• maintain directory authority relationships
• keep bandwidth authorities working (including setting the right balance between speed and location diversity)
• have enough tor browser default bridges, and keep them running smoothly [with censorship team]
• update the fallbackdirs list

Communication Channels

We do have a public and archived mailing list though: https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/network-health

Resources

• Stockholm's meeting notes.

== PRIORITIES==

1. detect and resolve bad relays

   • exitmap, sybil detection, hsdir traps

2. anomaly analysis / network health engineer [with network team]

   • establish baselines of expected network behavior
   • monitor network disruption or problems

3. relay advocacy [with community team]

   • strengthen relationships with non-profit orgs that run relays
   • maintain docs for setting up and running relays and bridges

4. make sure usage/growth stats are collected and accurate [with metrics team]

   • track network performance, relay diversity by various metrics

5. maintain the components of the network to keep it healthy

   • keep bandwidth authorities working (including setting the right balance between speed and location diversity)

PRIORITIES FOR 2020

As our capacity has been reduced, in 2020 we are going to focus on maintaining essential services.

1. Get all critical sbws bugs fixed so we can replace Torflow.
2. Run the "bad hsdir" hunter scripts and other exitmap scripts.
3. Surprise 'anomaly analysis' on the network as needed.
4. Keep moderating and answering the tor-relays mailing list.
5. Maintain the relay operation documentation.
6. Maintain the list of fallbackdirs.
7. Maintain the set of default bridges in Tor Browser.

Tickets

So far there is no own network health component in our Trac system and we likely won't create a new one as we are about to migrate to an own Gitlab instance. For now we use the network-health keyword on tickets that should be on the radar of the people caring about Tor's network health.

[[TicketQuery(status!=closed,keywords~=network-health,group=keyword,format=table,order=changetime,desc=true,col=id|summary|status|owner|reviewer|priority|severity|changetime|sponsor,group=owner,max=100)]]