report network status on peoplesopen website

[paidforby]

Can the status of the People's Open Network in Oakland, CA be presented on https://peoplesopen.net? I know there is this monitoring page but I'm not sure if it is accurate. Sometimes it is difficult to tell if the network is running properly. Perhaps, when the network is "down", the background image on peoplesopen.net could be changed to something like this or another such image that implies some form of disaster? There could also be a page for the status of deployed exit nodes? Or the current number of active nodes? Just some ideas, would be interested to hear other suggestions.

[bennlich]

moving relevant conversation from #106 to continue discussion:

from @jhpoelen :

assuming that most folks have secondary internet - why not make a red/green dashboard on http://peoplesopen.net to indicate the various services, including internet access through the exit node?

In addition to the green/red there would be a way to direct to discussion room / mailing list or other way to get in touch or help fix / troubleshoot the issue.

@bennlich I was thinking to spend some time on monitoring this week. Would you be interested in pairing up on that?

@jhpoelen Am definitely interested in pairing, but am also recovering from cold/flu :-D Feel free to ping me, or you can just wait for me to ping when I'm energetic again.

@paidforby

Sometimes it is difficult to tell if the network is running properly.

I wonder what the simple and important diagnostics would be. @jhpoelen sounds like you already have some ideas. Some connectivity questions that come to mind:

• how many nodes are connected to the exit node?
• how many sub-meshes are connected to the exit node? <-- is there better language to say this than sub-mesh?
• are sub-meshes of connected nodes able to reach other sub-meshes? (i.e. is babel routing through the exit node properly?)
• are nodes that are connected to the exit node able to reach the larger internet?
• within a sub-mesh, are nodes able to talk to each other?

Perhaps, when the network is "down", the background image on peoplesopen.net could be changed to something like this or another such image that implies some form of disaster?

lololol

Another thing I'm thinking is that maybe the mesh is never really "down", just fragmented? E.g. during the winter outage, there were still pieces of mesh happily floating around (like cow and chicken).

there is this monitoring page but I'm not sure if it is accurate.

Right. Added to my TODOs to research how that monitoring works or is supposed to work.

[jhpoelen]

A monitoring webpage is now available and has been used via https://peoplesopen.net/monitor . Suggest to open new issues if we need to improve this at https://github.com/sudomesh/monitor , the associated github repo.