[tor-relays] Help! TOR Relat dead after upgrading Ubuntu to 18.04

[Stephen Mollett]

Hi,

On 20/09/2018 10:37, Ben Riley wrote:
> ... I've actually got 4 ports open on the router for TOR - 9001, 9030,
> 9050 & 9051.
> 
> I set 9030 as my control port in torrc - does that port need to be open
> on the router? ...
You probably don't need or want either the control port or the SOCKS
port open on the router.

The control port is normally used to allow "front end" software like
Vidalia to connect to the node and get diagnostic information, change
some configuration settings, tell it to do things like build a new
circuit, etc. so it only needs to be accessible to machines from which
you want to manage the node in this way. If, for some reason, you did
want to manage the node over the internet, I would recommend keeping the
port blocked on the router anyway and tunnelling it through an SSH
connection to the server.

The SOCKS port is used to tunnel connections through Tor, either
directly from software that supports SOCKS, via a wrapper such as
socksify or torify or through a proxy server like Privoxy. Again, that
only needs to be accessible to machines from which you want to "use"
Tor. Again, if you want to use your node as a "gateway" into Tor from
elsewhere, you should tunnel the port over SSH.

Hope this helps,
Stephen