'tor' is an implementation of The Onion Routing system, as described in a bit more detail at http://www.onion-router.net/. You can read list archives, and subscribe to the mailing list, at http://archives.seul.org/or/dev/. Is your question in the FAQ? Should it be? ************************************************************************** See the INSTALL file for a quickstart. That is all you will probably need. ************************************************************************** ************************************************************************** You only need to look beyond this point if the quickstart in the INSTALL doesn't work for you. ************************************************************************** Do you want to run a tor server? We're looking for people with reasonably reliable Internet connections, that have at least 1Mbit each way. Currently we don't use all of that, but we want it available for burst traffic. (The Tor server doesn't need to be run as root, and doesn't need any special system permissions or kernel mods. You should probably run it as its own user though, especially if you run an identd service too.) First, copy torrc.sample to torrc (by default it's in /usr/local/etc/tor/), and edit the middle part. Create the DataDirectory, and make sure it's owned by the uid/gid that will be running tor. Fix your system clock so it's not too far off. Make sure name resolution works. Then run tor to generate keys. One of the files generated in your DataDirectory is your 'fingerprint' file. Mail it to tor-ops@freehaven.net. Please also tell us in that mail who you are, so we know whom to contact if there's any problem. Also describe what kind of connectivity the new server will have. If possible PGP sign your mail. You may find the initscript in contrib/tor.sh useful if you want to set up Tor to start at boot. Do you want to run a hidden service? Copy torrc.sample to torrc (by default it's in /usr/local/etc/tor/), and edit the bottom part. Then run Tor. It will create each HiddenServiceDir you have configured, and it will create a 'hostname' file which specifies the url (xyz.onion) for that service. You can tell people the url, and they can connect to it via their Tor client. Configuring tsocks: If you want to use Tor for protocols that can't use Privoxy, or with applications that are not socksified, then download tsocks (tsocks.sourceforge.net) and configure it to talk to localhost:9050 as a socks4 server. My /etc/tsocks.conf simply has: server_port = 9050 server = 127.0.0.1 (I had to "cd /usr/lib; ln -s /lib/libtsocks.so" to get the tsocks library working after install, since my libpath didn't include /lib.) Then you can do "tsocks ssh arma@moria.mit.edu". But note that if ssh is suid root, you either need to do this as root, or cp a local version of ssh that isn't suid. (On Windows, you may want to look at the Hummingbird SOCKS client, or at SocksCap, instead.)