Confused about Tor settings

[Claude LaFrenière]

Hi  *jon smith*   :


> I'd installed the vidalia-bundle-0.1.1.23-0.0.7-tiger
> and set up Firefox 1.5.0.6 (Mac) exactly as shown
> here:
> 
> http://tor.eff.org/docs/tor-doc-web.html.en
> 
> i.e. the first four set to "localhost  Port: 8118",
> and SOCKS Host to "localhost  Port: 9050"
> 
> This seemed to work according to the recommended test
> sites. But then I read somewhere that the "use proxy
> server for all protocols" box should be ticked. Which
> made no sense to me as that sets SOCKS Host to
> Port:8118 anyway. So I installed Torbutton 1.0.4
> thinking it'd do it all for me. But that set both the
> FTP Proxy and Gopher to "<blank> Port: 0". I emailed
> the creator of Torbutton who kindly explained that
> this is correct as otherwise ftp connections (set to
> 8118) would fail. I had thought that was supposed to
> happen (to prevent DNS leaks...or something). I've
> also read that if your browser uses SOCKS 4a you
> should use that (instead of the SOCKS v5 setting).

Tor button set the connection configuration to socks v5
and let ftp and gopher at 0...

> 
> This is hopelessly confusing to me. I've tried to
> understand the notes, but can't get my brain around
> any of this stuff. Could anyone please confirm/explain
> to a moron the exact, correct settings? Or is this
> just not for folk like me? 

You are confused because it is and you're not a moron jon smith !

I had tried different setup since last august for a lot of W xp
applications. For firefox the most simple connection config is
the Tor button setup.

But you have to know that DNS leaks are still presents ...

For example;

The only way if found was to block the UDP port 53 
for firefox (and the other applications) with my firewall.

No "about:config" parameters stop the DNS request launched
by this application (v 1.5.0.7) ...
[ network.proxy.socks_remote_dns set as True have no effect... ]

This [Tor button + fw setup]works perfectly for firefox 
but not with Thunderbird...
I tried various connection setup; Freecap, Torcap and so on.
These works with pop3 not pop3s (such as Gmail on port 995)
so for Tb I add pop3 and pop3s servers IP addresses in the HOSTS file.

The Ftp is always blocked with any connection configuration.
It can be partly avoided by using an external Ftp client and
the correct socks setup but not for many Ftp transfer within
the browser and I found no way to redirect these Ftp requests
to an external application ...

You have to know that the Ftp protocol is a weird one...
In active mode it's behaved like a "basic" p2p application
and in passive mode it's required a large set of available ports...

(Lat but not least I'm on W xp not Unix/Linux 
and you can figure out how a "Billou's OS" is less flexible:
no "sh" here !  :-(((  )

As you see there is a lot of reason to be confused!

Briefly:
Use Tor button with Firefox
Block UDP port 53 with your firewall for the applications you're using with Tor.
 
I hope you're less confused now.

Let us know.
:)

-- 
Claude LaFrenière