constructing circuits using control port

[Andrew]

On 8/14/07, Roger Dingledine <arma at mit.edu> wrote:
> On Tue, Aug 14, 2007 at 01:18:23PM -0400, Andrew wrote:
> > Here's an example of my control socket transcript:
> >
> > C 20070804034544: AUTHENTICATE
> > S 20070804034544: 250 OK
> > C 20070804034544: EXTENDCIRCUIT 0 [fingerprintscrubbed],[fingerprintscrubbed]
> > S 20070804034545: 250 EXTENDED 116
> > C 20070804034545: SETEVENTS STREAM CIRC
> > S 20070804034545: 250 OK
> > S 20070804034545: 650 CIRC 116 FAILED
> >
> > Is there anything wrong with my approach?
>
> A) Put the setevents earlier, in case you're missing some answers
> in between your EXTENDCIRCUIT and your SETEVENTS.

I've done this, and also added the EXTENDED keyword to get more
information, at Mike Perry's advice.  It's helped narrow the scope of
the problem down to a few distinct classes of errors.  Recreating the
above situation, I get a more useful message from the socket:
C 20070815020009: EXTENDCIRCUIT 0 [fingerprintscrubbed],[fingerprintscrubbed]
S 20070815020009: 250 EXTENDED 22
S 20070815020009: 650 CIRC 22 LAUNCHED
S 20070815020009: 650 CIRC 22 FAILED REASON=OR_CONN_CLOSED

> B) What do your Tor logs say?

In the above example at INFO level, all I get is this:
Aug 15 02:00:09.185 [info] handle_control_authenticate():
Authenticated control connection (9)
Aug 15 02:00:09.317 [info] circuit_n_conn_done(): or_conn failed. Closing circ.


> C) Which nodes are you trying? Are they running, etc?

I'm getting a list of nodes using

GETINFO desc/all-recent

And choosing random paths with acceptable exit policies from the
output.  I was working from the assumption that this provides a list
of routers that are all currently usable...maybe my problem is in this
thinking?

-Andrew