My advice is to open incoming port 9001 at your hardware firewall.
An account with dyndns is not needed. You do not need a fixed DNS name -- as far as I can tell, tor doesn't need any of that. My system doesn't.
> -postponed opening any ports (explaination below) > > 1) opened an account with dyndns to create a static ip address/host name > > 2) configured my hardware firewall (BT Home Hub) with the dyndns account > details > > > the vidalia message log presented me with my tor server indentity key > fingerprint & informed me: > > "Now checking whether ORPort XX.XXX.XXX.XXX:9001 is reachable..."
Did you verify that these numbers are correct? (your address)
> With regard to port forwarding/opening ports - whilst I've been running tor > as a client I've had no problems just allowing it via zone alarm & my > hardware firewall (BT Home Hub) hasn't required me to give tor any special > permission, tor has just worked. In the set-up that I've described here, > Zone Alarm informed me that Tor was attempting to act as a server & I gave > it permission to do this. I haven't received any warning messages apart from > the one I've detailed already.
Talking as a client needs no incoming connections. Nothing is needed at the BT Home Hub. For server, this needs to permit incoming 9001 connections (default port).
> 1) Now that I want to run Tor as a server, do I need to make any changes to > zone alarm and my hardware firewall (BT Home Hub) to allow specific ports? > In the article I mentioned at the beginning of this mail, the author refers > to opening ports 443 & 80.
For now, keep the default -- open port 9001 on the hub. After you get that working, you can consider switching your tor server to port 80.
> The options I have for configuring applications on the BT Hub are: > > protocol (tcp/udp)
TCP
> port range
9001 for normal, 80 for "Look like a web server".
> translate to internal (local network) port range
No entry -- no special translation.
> trigger protocol (tcp/udp) > trigger port
I don't know what these are for, so I can't say. I *think* this means "Once these ports have been used locally, to talk to the world, then enable this incoming port." If so, you want to leave them blank/unused.
> 2) I've used the vidalia console to configure tor as a server. Do I need to > make any other changes to the Torrc file (i.e those detailed on the wiki - > "Complete Tor walkthrough for Windows users") or is the configuration I've > made with the vidalia console sufficient? The settings I've made on the > vidalia server settings console remain commented-out on the Torrc file.
Vidalia does a fine job of getting it going. You can do more stuff later if you want, but the basics that it does are fine.
