[tor-dev] dynamic changes to ORPort set (via controller)

[Zack Weinberg]

On Mon, Sep 9, 2013 at 1:58 PM, Nick Mathewson <nickm at alum.mit.edu> wrote:
> On Mon, Sep 9, 2013 at 1:53 PM, Zack Weinberg <zackw at panix.com> wrote:
>> Suppose I have a relay (not a client) which starts out with one open
>> ORPort and a local controller.
>>
>> 1) Is there a better way (read "supported in STEM") than using SETCONF
>> to add ORPort lines, to direct this relay to open additional ORPorts?
>
> That's the way we'd intended.
>
>> 2) Will adding or removing ORPorts at runtime affect established
>> connections to other ORPorts (those which are open before and after
>> the change)?
>
> I don't think it will.

OK, thanks, good to hear.

> What have you got in mind here? It sounds clever.

The short version is, in order to run traffic analysis experiments on
Tor, I am puppeteering a bunch of TBBs (each in its own VM) from a
controller host which is also their dedicated private bridge.  (That
way, I can be sure I'm not spying on anyone other than myself.)   It
is convenient if each TBB gets its own ORPort at the bridge, but I was
hoping to avoid having to run more than one Tor process.  The puppets
come and go (they're probably going to be EC2 spot instances for
large-scale runs) so I wanted to know if I could dynamically assign
them ORPorts as they come in.

zw