[tor-talk] Review request: TorVM implementation in Qubes OS: Vidalia

[adrelanos]

> Future Work  Integrate Vidalia

About Vidalia again... I was quickly reading my dev ticket again (
https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/doc/TorBOX/Dev#SHELLSCRIPTSVidaliabydefaultGraphicalGatewayWAITINGFORVIDALIA0.3.x
), why it's not yet integrated into Whonix.

Summary:

"One drawback with Vidalia 0.2.15 remains... As soon as you edit torrc
with Vidalia (i.e. add non-obfuscated bridges, all comments in torrc get
lost, i.e. comments how to add obfuscated bridges get lost.).

Solved in 0.3.2-alpha. I am waiting for 0.3.2."

Another issue was, that Vidalia is explicitly not designed to manage a
system wide installed Tor. Vidalia can not start/stop a Tor instance, it
has not started itself.

Vidalia will also not be able to edit /etc/tor/torrc out of the box,
because Vialia gets started as user, while /etc/tor/torrc is owned by root.

I am not sure how to solve it best...

Running Tor/Vidalia as user is also not the best option, that would
prevent "sudo service restart tor" (probable also the Fedora
equivalent). Breaking "sudo service restart tor" and running Tor as user
is bad, since it can not be updated with by the system apt-get (or the
Fedora equivalent). (Imagine long running servers.)

I guess the best might be to have Tor managed by the system (apt-get...)
and to start Vidalia as a user. To edit /etc/tor/torrc, Vidalia needs an
exception to have write rights on that file. Vidalia's start/stop Tor
feature will break, I don't know how that could be solved. You still had
a Tor which is partially managed by gui and partially managed by cli.
Relaxing permission on Tor's data dir further for Vidalia broke Tor.

However, in qubes-os that all might be simpler to solve. Tor/Vidalia get
updated from dom0?

Cheers,
adrelanos