This diff contains significant improvements over the previous
implementation of the torsf experiment.
We add support for configuring different rendezvous methods after
the convo at https://github.com/ooni/probe/issues/2004. In doing
that, I've tried to use a terminology that is consistent with the
names being actually used by tor developers.
In terms of what to do next, this diff basically instruments
torsf to always rendezvous using domain fronting. Yet, it's also
possible to change the rendezvous method from the command line,
when using miniooni, which allows to experiment a bit more. In the
same vein, by default we use a persistent tor datadir, but it's
also possible to use a temporary datadir using the cmdline.
Here's how a generic invocation of `torsf` looks like:
```bash
./miniooni -O DisablePersistentDatadir=true \
-O RendezvousMethod=amp \
-O DisableProgress=true \
torsf
```
(The default is `DisablePersistentDatadir=false` and
`RendezvousMethod=domain_fronting`.)
With this implementation, we can start measuring whether snowflake
and tor together can boostrap, which seems the most important thing
to focus on at the beginning. Understanding why the bootstrap most
often does not converge with a temporary datadir on Android devices
remains instead an open problem for now. (I'll also update the
relevant issues or create new issues after commit this.)
We also address some methodology improvements that were proposed
in https://github.com/ooni/probe/issues/1686. Namely:
1. we record the tor version;
2. we include the bootstrap percentage by reading the logs;
3. we set the anomaly key correctly;
4. we measure the bytes send and received (by `tor` not by `snowflake`, since
doing it for snowflake seems more complex at this stage).
What remains to be done is the possibility of including Snowflake
events into the measurement, which is not possible until the new
improvements at common/event in snowflake.git are included into a
tagged version of snowflake itself. (I'll make sure to mention
this aspect to @cohosh in https://github.com/ooni/probe/issues/2004.)
This diff introduces a new package called `./internal/archival`. This package collects data from `./internal/model` network interfaces (e.g., `Dialer`, `QUICDialer`, `HTTPTransport`), saves such data into an internal tabular data format suitable for on-line processing and analysis, and allows exporting data into the OONI data format.
The code for collecting and the internal tabular data formats are adapted from `measurex`. The code for formatting and exporting OONI data-format-compliant structures is adapted from `netx/archival`.
My original objective was to _also_ (1) fully replace `netx/archival` with this package and (2) adapt `measurex` to use this package rather than its own code. Both operations seem easily feasible because: (a) this code is `measurex` code without extensions that are `measurex` related, which will need to be added back as part of the process; (b) the API provided by this code allows for trivially converting from using `netx/archival` to using this code.
Yet, both changes should not be taken lightly. After implementing them, there's need to spend some time doing QA and ensuring all nettests work as intended. However, I am planning a release in the next two weeks, and this QA task is likely going to defer the release. For this reason, I have chosen to commit the work done so far into the tree and defer the second part of this refactoring for a later moment in time. (This explains why the title mentions "1/N").
On a more high-level perspective, it would also be beneficial, I guess, to explain _why_ I am doing these changes. There are two intertwined reasons. The first reason is that `netx/archival` has shortcomings deriving from its original https://github.com/ooni/netx legacy. The most relevant shortcoming is that it saves all kind of data into the same tabular structure named `Event`. This design choice is unfortunate because it does not allow one to apply data-type specific logic when processing the results. In turn, this choice results in complex processing code. Therefore, I believe that replacing the code with event-specific data structures is clearly an improvement in terms of code maintainability and would quite likely lead us to more confidently change and evolve the codebase.
The second reason why I would like to move forward these changes is to unify the codepaths used for measuring. At this point in time, we basically have two codepaths: `./internal/engine/netx` and `./internal/measurex`. They both have pros and cons and I don't think we want to rewrite whole experiments using `netx`. Rather, what we probably want is to gradually merge these two codepaths such that `netx` is a set of abstractions on top of `measurex` (which is more low-level and has a more-easily-testable design). Because saving events and generating an archival data format out of them consists of at least 50% of the complexity of both `netx` and `measurex`, it seems reasonable to unify this archival-related part of the two codebases as the first step.
At the highest level of abstraction, these changes are part of the train of changes which will eventually lead us to bless `websteps` as a first class citizen in OONI land. Because `websteps` requires different underlying primitives, I chose to develop these primitives from scratch rather than wrestling with `netx`, which used another model. The model used by `websteps` is that we perform each operation in isolation and immediately we save the results, while `netx` creates whole data structures and collects all the events happening via tracing. We believe the model used by `websteps` to be better because it does not require your code to figure out everything that happened after the measurement, which is a source of subtle bugs in the current implementation. So, when I started implementing websteps I extracted the bits of `netx` that could also be beneficial to `websteps` into a separate library, thus `netxlite` was born.
The reference issue describing merging the archival of `netx` and `measurex` is https://github.com/ooni/probe/issues/1957. As of this writing the issue still references the original plan, which I could not complete by the end of this Sprint, so I am going to adapt the text of the issue to only refer to what was done in here next. Of course, I also need follow-up issues.
We recently started moving core data structures inside of the
internal/model package as detailed in https://github.com/ooni/probe/issues/1885.
The chief reason to do that is to have a set of fundamental
shared data types to help us rationalize the codebase.
This specific diff moves internal/netx/archival's core data types
inside the internal/model package. While there, it also refactors the
existing tests to improve their quality. Additionally, we also added
an extra test to ensure `ArchivalHTTPBody` is an alias for
`ArchivalMaybeBinaryData`, which is required to ensure the
custom JSON serialization process works for it.
We're doing that because both internal/netx/archival and
internal/measurex define their own archival data structures.
We developed measurex using its own structures because it
allowed to iterate more quickly. Now that we have sketched
out measurex, the time has come to consolidate.
My overall aim is to spend a few more hours this week on
engineering measurex. This work is preliminary work before
we finish up both measurex and websteps.
We described this cleanup in https://github.com/ooni/probe/issues/1957.
Since https://github.com/ooni/probe-cli/pull/527, if an experiment
returns an error, the corresponding measurement is not submitted since
the semantics of returning an error is that something fundamental
went wrong (e.g., we could not parse the input URL).
This diff ensures that all experiments only return and error when
something fundamental was wrong and return nil otherwise.
Reference issue: https://github.com/ooni/probe/issues/1808.
## Checklist
- [x] I have read the [contribution guidelines](https://github.com/ooni/probe-cli/blob/master/CONTRIBUTING.md)
- [x] reference issue for this pull request: https://github.com/ooni/probe/issues/1885
- [x] related ooni/spec pull request: N/A
Location of the issue tracker: https://github.com/ooni/probe
## Description
This PR contains a set of changes to move important interfaces and data types into the `./internal/model` package.
The criteria for including an interface or data type in here is roughly that the type should be important and used by several packages. We are especially interested to move more interfaces here to increase modularity.
An additional side effect is that, by reading this package, one should be able to understand more quickly how different parts of the codebase interact with each other.
This is what I want to move in `internal/model`:
- [x] most important interfaces from `internal/netxlite`
- [x] everything that was previously part of `internal/engine/model`
- [x] mocks from `internal/netxlite/mocks` should also be moved in here as a subpackage
