Tor Question

[eric.jung at yahoo.com]

Steve, you can open sockets and send data down them natively in Gecko-based apps... and the XPCOM components are scriptable, so you don't have to write any C/C++. So, there's no need to write an command-line program to send the plaintext down the socket (only to launch it from Torpark). Let me know if you need pointers.

-eric


----- Original Message ----
From: Arrakistor <arrakistor at gmail.com>
To: Roger Dingledine <or-talk at freehaven.net>
Sent: Tuesday, August 1, 2006 11:37:17 PM
Subject: Re[2]: Tor Question

Roger,

Okay,  so  i  COULD  send the plaintext signal to the control port and
have  success  under win32. I thought you said this, but questioned my
memory once i read the code.

The  reason I ask about winking nodes is that I added a button to kill
the  tor  process.  When  torpark  notices  that  there is no longer a
tor.exe  process,  it  restarts it. Occasionally the tor process would
instantly  exit  for  some reason, too infrequent/inconsistent to tell
everyone to log, but frequent enough to be an annoyance. The upshot is
that  if  you  want  to flush your tor circuit, you can simply click a
button  on  the  toolbar  and  it  gets  you a new circuit. I did this
because  often a user will be surfing and circuit fails for one reason
or another and they have to shut down and restart the browser to get a
new  circuit.  Because the process is so dirty, I am worried about how
it may affect the tor network.

I still have yet to heavily research making torpark actually talk with
tor.exe  instead  of  kicking it around. I wonder if it is possible to
pipe  these  plaintexts  directly to the controlport with some command
line program.

Regards,
 Arrakistor

Tuesday, August 1, 2006, 10:11:59 PM, you wrote:

> On Tue, Aug 01, 2006 at 10:02:57PM -0500, Arrakistor wrote:
>> I  have  a  question.  I  noticed  in some code that it said if tor is
>> running  on  a  win32  system,  to  disable signals. So even if I sent
>> signals  like sighup to the process, it wouldn't be listening. Is this
>> true?

> Correct. Windows doesn't have signals, so there is no concept of sending
> a sighup to a Windows process.

> We fake this by letting you connect on the controlport and send the string
> "signal hup", aka "signal reload". Then Tor behaves as though you just
> sent it a unix-style signal.

>> Also,  what kind of damage does it do to the tor network for a node to
>> just instantly disappear without notifying the network?

> Any circuit that's currently using that node breaks. So if a user has a
> long-term IRC or IM connection on that circuit, she gets disconnected.
> Tor will automatically recover and build new circuits, but the application
> will have to reconnect over the new circuit.

> We try to tolerate nodes that appear and disappear frequently, by avoiding
> them when building circuits for destination ports that we expect will
> want high uptime: see LongLivedPorts in your manual page. After all,
> servers will have to disappear and reappear periodically.

> But if they aren't online very long, new clients won't have time to hear
> about them from the directories, so we won't be able to make good use
> of them. This is another item on our list of hard things that ought to
> be fixed. :)

> Why do you ask?

> --Roger





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