how to confirm that tor is working?

[patgus]

 Ok, I see a lot of connections with netstat and in the logs. But I also get a message in the logs every so often that I am unable to confirm that the DIR and OR port are available. After a few hours all I receive are log messages that my server cannot confirm that the ports are available and no more connection messages. I am also seeing a lot of "scrubbed" connections and "giving up" messages in the logs.
 I am using the latest stable version, I am behind a NAT firewall, port forwarding has been setup per instructions on both the server and the NAT firewall.