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Tor

Documentation

What you get on StartOS

  • A running Tor daemon with a SOCKS5 proxy on port 9050 that other StartOS services reach over the internal bridge to connect to .onion destinations.
  • The ability to add a .onion address to any interface of any other installed service, optionally with your own vanity key.
  • Optional relay or bridge mode to contribute capacity to the Tor network.
  • Automatic recovery when Tor gets stuck on a bad entry node, plus a Reset Tor Connection action to fix it yourself.

Warnings

  • Uninstalling Tor permanently deletes all onion service keys and .onion addresses. Any service reachable through one of those addresses will lose it. Make a backup first if you want to keep your addresses.

Using Tor

Adding a .onion address to another service

Open the specific interface of the other service you want to expose over Tor. On that interface's page you'll find a Tor table; from there you can add or remove hidden services for that interface. When adding one you can supply a base64 ed25519 expanded private key for a vanity address, or leave that blank and StartOS will generate a fresh key. The .onion lives with the interface you attached it to — it appears and disappears with that interface. You can add an SSL or a non-SSL onion. The SSL toggle starts on for a service that is reachable only over SSL, and off for a web interface, since Tor already secures the connection and a certificate on a web interface's .onion only adds a browser warning. An interface that terminates its own TLS (SSL-only) can only take an SSL onion, since it has no plaintext endpoint to forward to.

Your .onion addresses look after themselves once they exist. If a service changes the port or the encryption it is served on, Tor re-points the address the next time it starts, so it keeps answering without you doing anything and the address itself never changes. An address whose interface has no reachable endpoint left is reported in the logs and otherwise left alone.

Tor is stuck connecting

Tor enters the network through a small set of entry nodes, and it sticks with the ones it picked on purpose — hopping between entry points would make you easier to track. The downside is that if one of them goes bad, Tor keeps retrying it anyway: it stalls partway through connecting, or it connects but nothing loads. Restarting Tor does not fix this, because the entry node it picked is saved to disk and chosen again on the next start.

Tor now fixes this on its own. If it can't connect for a few minutes it switches entry nodes, and if that isn't enough it clears its saved network data and restarts so it starts fresh. Tor's health status tells you where it is while this happens.

To fix it yourself without waiting, open Tor's Actions menu and run Reset Tor Connection. Tor clears the network data it has saved and restarts, then reconnects with new entry nodes — give it a few minutes before it's usable again.

Your .onion addresses are never affected, by either route.

If Tor still can't connect after a reset, its health status will say so, and the problem is almost certainly your server's internet connection rather than Tor itself.

Running a relay or bridge

  1. Open Tor's Actions menu and run Configure Relay.
  2. Toggle Enabled, then set a nickname, contact info, OR port, and bandwidth rate / burst. For a bridge, enable Bridge Mode.
  3. Save. The OR port shows up under Interfaces as Tor Relay OR Port once relay mode is on.