tor v0.1.0.2 rc - Problem connecting to news servers

Geoffrey Goodell goodell at cassandra.eecs.harvard.edu
Tue Apr 5 03:59:30 UTC 2005


On Tue, Apr 05, 2005 at 04:23:39AM +0100, Konstantine wrote:
> I am having problems connecting to any news server using thunderbird
> with tor and privoxy. Connection times out everytime.

> all other applications are 'torifed?' with no problem

Hi Konstantine,

Generally speaking, you can only connect to a particular port via Tor if
your Tor client is able to use a node configured to "exit" to that
particular port.  Whether a given Tor node is configured to exit to a
particular port is a matter of policy.  The right-hand side of this
table shows the exit policies for each Tor node for a sampling of ports.

http://serifos.eecs.harvard.edu:8000/cgi-bin/exit.pl

Note that News is port 119, and that presently there are only three Tor
nodes that exit to port 119.  Of those three, one is too slow to use.
When you only have two nodes to choose from, you are likely to run into
problems such as nodes being maxed out, either by bandwidth or by CPU.
It is unsurprising given this circumstance that you were unable to
connect to port 119.

If you believe that Tor should allow connections to port 119, then you
should run a Tor node with a policy that supports this.  However, the
reason that Tor administrators generally choose to not exit to port 119
(and the reason why Tor developers chose not to allow connections to
port 119 by default) is the potential for malicious parties to abuse Tor
to send spam.

Please let us know if you have further questions.  We hope that your
experience using Tor for other applications has been more successful!

Geoff
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