[Freedombox-discuss] possible bug? tor installation does not open ports 9001, 9030?

[David Mintz]

I posted the below message some days ago and got no response. Since then
I tried again, and managed to figure out a way -- if not THE way -- to
fix. I had previously installed the Tor package using Plinth and the web
interface, but my Tor ports were not reachable from the outside. Tried a
lot of things (in my naive way), no luck, gave up, started over with a
totally fresh OS installation, hoping to wipe the slate clean.
Next, I simply installed with `apt install tor`.  Again, port not
reachable errors.  Finally I figured out firewall-cmd enough to open
the ports manually (so to speak), with `firewall-cmd  --permanent
--add-port=9001/tcp --zone=internal`,  and again for port 9030. Now
my life is happy.
But that raises the question of whether the UI for Tor installation and
setup has an issue in Plinth. I am not sure, that's why I ask, but I
would have thought Plinth would have automatically done the firewall
config for me. So I looked for a bug report at
https://salsa.debian.org/freedombox-team/plinth/issues and could not
find anything relevant when filtering for "tor".
Any thoughts as to how to figure out whether there's an issue to report?
---
David Mintz
https://davidmintz.org
Capitalism has failed. https://wsws.org

On Tue, Jan 29, 2019, at 10:02 AM, David Mintz wrote:
>
> I've been happily running a Tor relay node -- the publicly published,> non-exit kind -- on a desktop machine, and decided it would be nice to> use FreedomBox on a SBC for that instead, to avoid the need to
> keep the> desktop powered up 24x7 just for the sake of the Tor node. So I got a> Raspberry Pi 3 B+ and installed FreedomBox per the instructions -- so> far so good. This is behind a Verizon router with port forwarding
> configured appropriately.
>
> Then I tried installing Tor on the Raspberry through plinth, and
> updating the port forwarding accordingly (i.e., disabled the rule that> forwarded to the desktop box and added one to forward to the
> FreedomBox;> I'm confident I got my IP addresses and port numbers right.) I got
> errors to the effect that my Tor was not reachable from the outside. I> tried all kinds of fiddling with systemd configs, with tor
> config files,> etc., to no avail.
>
> Please forgive me for the sin of not providing actual error output,
> configurations, a detailed narrative of what I did, etc. I got
> impatient> and re-installed everything, and went back to running Tor on my
> desktop> for now, and all that information is unavailable. I just want
> to ask as> a general question whether I should expect the following alternative
> strategy to work:
>
> (1) disable Tor on the desktop and remove port forwarding rules.
>
> (2) enable port forwarding to the FreedomBox, consistent with the
>     ORPort> and DirPort numbers set in the tor config
>
> (3) install tor from the command line according to
> https://www.torproject.org/docs/debian.html.en
>
> (4) copy my torrc file over from the desktop and restart the service
>

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