[tor-bugs] #4031 [Tor Client]: Firefox fails to find SOCKS proxy after tor is restarted through Vidalia

[Tor Bug Tracker & Wiki]

#4031: Firefox fails to find SOCKS proxy after tor is restarted through Vidalia
------------------------+---------------------------------------------------
 Reporter:  rpw         |          Owner:  nickm   
     Type:  defect      |         Status:  assigned
 Priority:  normal      |      Milestone:          
Component:  Tor Client  |        Version:          
 Keywords:              |         Parent:          
   Points:              |   Actualpoints:          
------------------------+---------------------------------------------------

Comment(by nickm):

 >I think having some way to have Tor either prefer ports, or be smarter
 about trying to reusing them is the least-effort most-gain for this
 particular issue.

 So, above I tried to explain why I don't think this is actually a fix
 here.  My argument was that if Tor is allowed to change its ports, then
 other programs need to be able to handle it when Tor changes its ports.
 If we're telling Tor "Don't change your ports unless you really have to",
 then we have to handle the case where Tor decides that it really has to,
 right?  Otherwise we're not fixing this bug; we're just making it less
 common.

 Am I going wrong someplace in the above reasoning?

 (Also, trying to make ports stable across Tor restarts is probably not an
 easy fix to implement, because of the fact that you can listen to more
 than one of them.  If this needs to get fixed soon in 0.2.2.x, I'd be
 worried about destabilizing Tor to implement it.)

 > Alternatively, maybe Vidalia could be the one who tells Tor "this was
 your port from before the restart" using command line arguments for
 ControlPort and SocksPort to override the torrc auto options from disk.

 This seems like a good idea to me.  It's got the advantage that it means
 what it says: if Tor can't reuse the same port, Tor should fail to start
 up, since Firefox can't cope.

-- 
Ticket URL: <https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/4031#comment:9>
Tor Bug Tracker & Wiki <https://trac.torproject.org/>
The Tor Project: anonymity online