Hi, > On 10. May 2026, at 11:10, nusenu via tor-relays > <[email protected]> wrote: > since we have a significantly less > cumbersome and much less error prone way for tor relay operators > to self-declare their relay groups using the Happy Family design > I was thinking about whether we actually need ContactInfo > at the relay fingerprint level or if we only need it at family ID level? > > The idea: > - only a single relay in a family publishes a ContactInfo that is valid for > the entire family > > benefits: > - easiers ContactInfo management for relay operatos not using configuration > management, since they only need to update a single config > - less redundant information in relay metadata that gets received and > distributed by tor directory authority > - significantly smaller onionoo details files > > downsides: > - no "backup channel" in case software has Happy Family related issues - like > we saw in collector/onionoo > - less flexibility you want to have different contacts for different servers > > > I do not expect that rust-based tor relays - that hopefully significantly > reduce the number of tor daemons an operator > has to run to make use of multi-core CPUs will take over the tor network soon. > So this will remain a relevant question for the time being. > > This topic is limited to relays and not bridges until bridges fully support > Happy Family. > > If there are no strong reasons for relay level ContactInfos I might implement > the idea in a minor variation in ansible-relayor: > only a single tor instance per server will get a ContactInfo torrc entry. > The CIISS spec would also be updated to reflect that.
thanks for thinking about the design space more! For this concrete idea, I am not a fan, however: - For external parties, it may be harder to link a relay to its contact info - If, for whatever reason, the relay carrying the contact information is missing from a consensus, there is no link to retrieve this information Have you done some analysis how much bandwidth this would save in practice? I would hope compression actually takes care of the bulk of the problem for larger families, but I am not entirely sure of that. Thanks Sebastian _______________________________________________ tor-relays mailing list -- [email protected] To unsubscribe send an email to [email protected]
