Summary: TPA is planning to retire the Dangerzone WebDAV processor service. It's the bot you can share files with on Nextcloud to sanitize documents. It has already been turned off and the service will be fully retired in a month.
Background
The dangerzone service was established in 2021 to avoid hiring committees to open untrusted files from the internet.
We've had numerous problems with this, including reliability and performance issues, the latest of which were possibly us hammering the Nextcloud server needlessly.
The service seems largely unused: in the past year, only five files or folders were processed by the service.
Since the service was deployed, the original need has largely been supplanted, as we now use a third-party service (Manatal) to process job applications.
Today, the service was stopped, partly to confirm it's not being used.
Proposal
Fully retire the Dangerzone service. In one month from now, the virtual machine would be shutdown and the backups deleted another month after that.
Timeline
- 2025-01-28 (today): service stopped
- 2025-02-28 (in a month): virtual machine destroyed
- 2025-03-28 (in two months): backups destroyed
Alternatives considered
Recovering the service after retirement
If we change our mind, it's possible to restore the service, to a certain extent.
The machine setup is mostly automated: restoring the service involves creating a virtual machine, a bot account in Nextcloud, and sharing the credentials with our configuration management.
But the service would need lots of work to be restored to proper working order, however, and we do not have the resources to do so at the moment.
References
Comments welcome by email or in https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/tpa/dangerzone-webdav-processor/-/issues/25.