Geting Started Questions better said as "Help"

[Roadburner]

Good morning all,

Please forgive me if this is a stupid question but I am quite new to
operating a Tor server (started this weekend).

I work a lot of hours behind a computer writing documents, designing
operator devices, systems, drives, etc. Most of the software I write
is specific to the programmable logic controller it will run on, for
example RockWell ControlLogix. This is typically in the form of relay
ladder or control block languages. More "real time" type of control
software. The PC is my interface to these specialized computers and I
freely admit I know much more about them than PCs or the networking.
That I leave to my young engineers that were trained on them in
college. I guess I know more about the process and sequencing of the
equipment I write software for rather than the platform (a PC) I use
to write it on. Though I spend so many hours each day behind a flat
panel, my friends tease me that I can't read a paper because it isn't
backlit, I actually am a bit PC illiterate. For me, it is just a tool
and interface into the "real time" world of industrial control
systems.

Being a bit concerned about privacy, I have used PGP and the anonymous
remailer system for many years. I have been using Tor and Privoxy with
Firefox as my web browser and JBN2 as my e-mail client. Having taken
advantage of those services  freely provided by others, I feel that I
owe some measure of payback to the rest of the privacy community.
Since I have very little personal time available, I thought running a
Tor server would be a nice way to help payback the community.

Getting the sever up and running was a bit of a challenge. I had
completely forgotten about a wireless router I had put in years ago.
After a great deal of frustration, I received some very kind help and
realized I needed to add port forwarding. I was able to get the server
up and running on Saturday.

Yesterday, I was back at the office and my adult? kids:) were over to
visit. They always like to play on the Internet since I have a cable
connection and neither of them do. When I got home, I realized the
server was shut down. I guess they shut it down not knowing what it
was since I was not running it as a service.

So, I decided to run it as a service to prevent "accidents". At the
same time, JBN will use Tor in the first hop of a remailer connection
if Tor is running out of the same directory as JBN.

So, I reinstalled it to the same directory as JBN, opened up the Exit
Policy a bit and fired it back up as a service. The first thing I
noticed was that the published Exit Policy http://moria.seul.org:9031/
was not the same as I had intended, even though the router.desc I
received back was the same configuration as I intended. I uninstalled
it as a service and ran it normally and after a couple of hours,
http://moria.seul.org:9031/router.desc description matched my intended
Exit Policy. All was well.

At about 3:00 AM I woke up for a trip to the bathroom and was pleased
to see all was well. So, I fired it back up as a service, and got the
router.desc back which matched the configuration as I intended. When I
checked on it this morning, http://moria.seul.org:9031/router.desc
shows that my configuration is nearly the same as what it was when I first
registered it with tor-ops at freehaven.net.

Is this just because I registered it with one fingerprint and the new
configuration as a service has a different fingerprint? Somehow I
think that is the case. I will send a message to them that there has
been a change to the serve fingerprint.

Just wondering if that might be the case or am I doing something
wrong?

John G. Sobeski
-- 
Best regards,
 Roadburner                          mailto:roadburner at comcast.net
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