[tor-dev] Tor port restriction option was removed

[Roger Dingledine]

On Wed, Jul 04, 2018 at 11:20:31PM -0700, Keifer Bly wrote:
> So tor will automatically use port 80 or 443 if Those are the only ones open?

Tor will choose Guard relays at random until one of them works(*).

It looks like around 844 Guard relays are listening on port 443 right now,
out of the 1858 available Guard relays.

% grep -B1 Guard cached-consensus |grep "^r "|grep " 443 "|wc -l
844
% grep -B1 Guard cached-consensus |grep "^r "|wc -l
1858

So if 443 works for you, it won't be many tries until you try a relay
that works for you.

And once you reach a Guard that works, it will become one of your guards
that you keep using, so you'll only do the "flail around trying to find
one" step when you need to replace your guard.

Are you concerned that we have the wrong design for general users, or
are you having a specific problem?

--Roger

(*) Actually, before Tor starts attempting to reach Guards, it first
needs to bootstrap the consensus document from either the directory
authorities or the fallback directory servers -- but they have a pretty
similar distribution of ports they listen on.