[tor-relays] TBB on same system as relay?

Rick Huebner rhuebner at radiks.net
Fri Oct 21 01:30:59 UTC 2011


I run a relay 24/7, but sometimes also want to use Tor myself as a 
client.  Until now, I've been using the Tor Button in my normal Firefox 
browser to switch in and out of Tor mode as needed, but now I see that 
going forward, the standalone Tor Browser Bundle is the only recommended 
way of using Tor as a client.  How can I run the TBB on my system 
without interfering with my relay?  When I just tried it now, the TBB 
brought up a second Vidalia instance which then tried to command my 
relay's existing Tor instance instead of spawning a second one for 
itself.  This caused it to prompt for the relay's command interface 
password, but I cancelled out since I suspect that allowing the TBB to 
interfere with my relay's Tor process would lead to Bad Things, e.g. 
reconfiguring its options on the fly to a client-mode config and 
dropping all my users.

So... how do relay operators use Tor themselves, if they can't run TBB?  
Or is there a way to configure them to live safely together?  Or have I 
misinterpreted the new TBB focus, and the relay bundles will continue to 
support use as a client in the future as they do now?   I'm using 
Windows 7 if that matters, but I doubt it.



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