eRPC - An efficient Relay Partition Checker

A flexible tool that aims to assess partition among relays in the Tor Network.

Features

Here are some current/aspiring features of the entire project

✅ Build circuits and distribute work to secondary worker through the gRPC server
✅ Uniquely identify a secondry worker by it’s IP Addr and store state individually
✅ Handle work loss recovery after a secondary worker is assigned and secondary worker goes out of contact
✅ Expliclty turn off gRPC server and only use internal scanner ,vice versa and turning on both(ability of being/not being distributed)
✅ Support for saving output data to Neo4j Graph Database
✅ Handle influx of new Relays
✅ Support for saving output data to file based database such as Sqlite
✅ Support for choosing Neo4j and Sqlite as option
✅ Control number of parallel circuit creations at a time
✅ Logging
☑ Pause and Resume of the primary worker
☐ Load already performed scans from the database and start working from where things were after application session was turned off and on again
☐ Control the partition checking by including only specific relay or excluding specific relays based on “filter”
☐ Using data from OnionPerf metrics

✅ Build circuits on primary worker provided work
✅ Control configuration such as parallel circuit creation attempts by explicit assignment through env variables or through rpc call to primary worker itself.
✅ Handle network failures such as secondary work getting disconnected while working on the work assigned by the primary worker and reconnecting and retries for those failures
✅ Logging

To know the application’s aim, project structure, architecture and how to run this application please go through the Technical documentation

This application was built and tested in Rust v1.77.0, so we would recommend you to get at least that version. You can install rust toolchains through here.
Some dynamic libraries and packages this application demands and you would need to install are : libssl-dev, libsqlite3-dev, liblzma-dev, protobuf-compiler, pkg-config
IMPORTANT : Set the max limit for open file descriptors to something big if you have high no of parallel ciruit build attempts. Run ulimit -n 99999 if you have low limit of open file descriptors

For configurations please look at configure and run in the WiKi or you can directly look at primary worker config

Follow the following steps :

Clone the repo using git clone https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/network-health/erpc
Enter into the root of the project using cd erpc.
You have the option of using cargo directly to run the application, or produce the primary worker binary first and then run it. We’ll use the cargo option for now.
To Make sure that you have the configuration files for the primary worker please do look at these configuration files or you can simply go to the config directory for the primary worker by using cd config/primary from the root of the repo.
You can tweak the application’s functioning configurations as you want by tweaking the values set in the Config.toml and .env file.
You can tweak the application’s logging configuration by tweaking the values set in log_config.yml.

If you were to add the following in the log_config.yml, then you will be able to log to both, the log file and stdout.


root:
level: debug
appenders:
  - output
  - stdout

You can discard logging to either stdout or log file by simply removing the line - output or - stdout in the log_config.yml file.

To understand the configurations in depth, please visit here.

After you have set the configuration, you can run the primary worker by either running
- cargo run --release --bin primary -- --config config/primary/Config.toml --env config/primary/.env --log-config config/primary/log_config.yml, from the root of the project, which allows you to load the configuration files by specifying the path to them.
- cargo run from the *root of the project, which allows you to load the default configuration files.