Tor Beginner's Questions

[Roger Dingledine]

On Fri, Dec 31, 2004 at 05:08:43PM +1100, ffi2fdq02 at sneakemail.com wrote:
> 1)  "allow local connections to port 8118 and port 9050"
> 
>      Maybe I'm missing some subtlety in the word 'local' but does this 
> mean incoming, outgoing, neither or both should be allowed?  As far as 
> I know, I haven't allowed either port incoming or outgoing and yet tor 
> client seems to be working.

Local means "from 127.0.0.1 to 127.0.0.1" -- some firewalls seem to block
even these sorts of connections, and people who run them don't tend to
realize they're running them, so it's sort of hard to document for. Any
suggestions on how to fix the wording?

> 2)  "outgoing connections... <allow> ports 80, 443, and 9001-9033"
> 
>      I've allowed outgoing connections on all (only) these ports.  Why 
> does tor still regularly make attempts at other ports.  I blocked them 
> all and the tor client still works.  Is there any advantage to allowing 
> these too?  Is there a definable range?

I've just added this answer as
http://wiki.noreply.org/wiki/TheOnionRouter/TorFAQ#OutboundFirewallPorts

Currently the 'FirewallPorts' config option doesn't support ranges, just
numbers. Is this something we should fix?

Thanks,
--Roger