[tor-talk] torstatus.blutmagie.de

[Olaf Selke]

Hello folks,

I'm planning to shut down my Tor network status site within the next
weeks. The payed SSL certificate will expire 11/06/18 and the Debian 6
OS is too old to switch to Let’s Encrypt without trouble.

torstatus.blutmagie.de started in 2007. In February 2015 the site moved
from Guetersloh/Germany to Moscow/Russia. It is heavily used by all kind
of corporations, citizens, and government agencies especially from
Eastern Europe, the Far and Middle East, and South America.

awstats September 2018
=======================
Unique visitors: 41507
Number of visits: 512265
Pages: 6286362
Hits: 7722213
Bandwidth: 1512.42 GB

cheers Olaf

[Roman Mamedov]

On Tue, 16 Oct 2018 10:58:15 +0200
Olaf Selke <***@blutmagie.de> wrote:

Hello,

Post by Olaf Selke
I'm planning to shut down my Tor network status site within the next
weeks. The payed SSL certificate will expire 11/06/18

You don't have a redirect to HTTPS, I never knew you had that in the first
place, always accessing the site via plain HTTP.

Post by Olaf Selke
Debian 6 OS is too old to switch to Let’s Encrypt without trouble.

Take a look at the "dehydrated" Let's Encrypt client:
https://github.com/lukas2511/dehydrated
It is just a single bash script.

Or maybe you could just run the site as a Tor Hidden Service?

[George]

Post by Olaf Selke
Hello folks,
I'm planning to shut down my Tor network status site within the next

Enormous thanks for all your work Olaf.

I'm among many who've used BlutMagie to get a grasp of the public Tor
network, and we at TorBSD also used your CSV data to create useful stats
about network diversity.

While metrics. continues to be a next step, I still find myself wishing
for the simple birds-eye view that your Tor Status provides.

g

(and if I remember correctly, you did run a heavy exit for many years in
the past also..)

[Iain Learmonth]

Hi,

Post by George
While metrics. continues to be a next step, I still find myself wishing
for the simple birds-eye view that your Tor Status provides.

Can you provide some examples of things you can do with torstatus that
you can't do with Tor Metrics' tools?

Perhaps they are easy to implement.

Thanks,
Iain.

[George]

Post by Iain Learmonth
Hi,

Post by George
While metrics. continues to be a next step, I still find myself wishing
for the simple birds-eye view that your Tor Status provides.

Can you provide some examples of things you can do with torstatus that
you can't do with Tor Metrics' tools?
Perhaps they are easy to implement.

Thanks Iain.

I think what you quoted above is the most important thing: the bird's
eye view. We are doing a number of diversity-related angles already
(https://torbsd.org/oostats.html) but that big-picture view that was the
default page of TorStatus always was a nice overview of the public network.

My point is not that metrics. isn't a huge step forward.... I think it's
a great tool and a massive improvement.

g

[grarpamp]

the bird's eye view ... the default page

Same as original Hidden Wiki... all datas in your face.

Though with today's scale, an overall dashboard panel
on one page is what is needed...

"What is the status?"

[Roman Mamedov]

On Thu, 18 Oct 2018 10:26:34 +0100

Post by Iain Learmonth

Post by George
While metrics. continues to be a next step, I still find myself wishing
for the simple birds-eye view that your Tor Status provides.

Can you provide some examples of things you can do with torstatus that
you can't do with Tor Metrics' tools?
Perhaps they are easy to implement.

First of all, it adds a fun little competitive aspect to running a relay. In
effect it's a leaderboard of all relays ranked by bandwidth -- I like checking
out how high mine can climb, and who are the "closest competitors", with all
their funny, interesting and peculiar nicknames.

It is just the very nature of TorStatus, it is what you get right away when
loading it. Whereas with Metrics, while it does have a faint resemblance of
the same with its "top relays" display at
https://metrics.torproject.org/rs.html#toprelays...

* Firstly, it's by far not the focus of that website, there it's just an
afterthought buried deep and under a weirdly located button in "Relay
search" of all places. Instead I would expect that to be a major or even
the primary section under "Servers".

* Secondly, it only lists the top 250 relays -- apparently smaller ones do
not matter -- and defaults to displaying just 10 per page, making it
limited and inconvenient as the "bird's eye" overview. Clearly that's not
the use that authors had in mind.

But the more important aspect is that TorStatus feels to be basically the
place where you are given credit for running a relay. You know kind of like
ending credits in a movie. Yes even if just with a line among thousands of
other lines. But all those lines representing relays and exits are what Tor
is, and look, some of your own are now up there too! You are now a part of it.
This matters a thousand times more than a canned "thanks for running a relay"
on a mailing list.

[Olaf Selke]

Am 18.10.2018 um 11:26 schrieb Iain Learmonth:>

Post by Iain Learmonth
Can you provide some examples of things you can do with torstatus that
you can't do with Tor Metrics' tools?

most popular on torstatus.blutmagie.de with about one http request/s are
the every 10 minutes or so autogenerated csv lists of all nodes and all
exit nodes. According the info provided by the user agent string the csv
files are retrieved by scripts.

https://torstatus.blutmagie.de/ip_list_all.php/Tor_ip_list_ALL.csv
https://torstatus.blutmagie.de/ip_list_exit.php/Tor_ip_list_EXIT.csv

Is this service available on metrics?

Olaf

[nusenu]

Post by Olaf Selke
Am 18.10.2018 um 11:26 schrieb Iain Learmonth:>

Post by Iain Learmonth
Can you provide some examples of things you can do with torstatus that
you can't do with Tor Metrics' tools?

most popular on torstatus.blutmagie.de with about one http request/s are the every 10 minutes or so autogenerated csv lists of all nodes and all exit nodes. According the info provided by the user agent string the csv files are retrieved by scripts.
https://torstatus.blutmagie.de/ip_list_all.php/Tor_ip_list_ALL.csv
https://torstatus.blutmagie.de/ip_list_exit.php/Tor_ip_list_EXIT.csv
Is this service available on metrics?

not directly but close enough onionoo provides data in json.

The relevant fields are:
or_addresses (which contain ports and need postprocessing)
https://onionoo.torproject.org/details?&fields=or_addresses

exit_addresses (more than one per exit is possible)
https://onionoo.torproject.org/details?fields=exit_addresses&flag=exit

I can only guess what Tor_ip_list_EXIT.csv contains, but if that is OR addresses of exits
then this is something slightly different than the above onionoo URL (which is able to show
exit IP addresses based on active measurements at least for IPv4)


To direct your users to existing data it would be great if you could
display some info on your page about the upcoming shutdown and replace the content of the CSV files
with an information text that says it will be discontinued and where
one might get the same kind of data.


thanks for running your website for so many years!
nusenu

[grarpamp]

Post by George

Post by Olaf Selke
I'm planning to shut down my Tor network status site within the next

Enormous thanks for all your work Olaf.
(and if I remember correctly, you did run a heavy exit for many years in
the past also..)

[Vasilis]

Hi Olaf,

Post by Olaf Selke
Hello folks,
I'm planning to shut down my Tor network status site within the next weeks. The
payed SSL certificate will expire 11/06/18 and the Debian 6 OS is too old to
switch to Let’s Encrypt without trouble.

Thanks a lot for running 'torstatus.blutmagie.de'!

Do you have the source available somewhere in case someone would like to
(re)built it?


Cheers,
~Vasilis