Newbie question re Tor

Support and Troubleshooting
1

Hi all,

Have just set up Umbrel for the first time and successfully setup Bticoin Node and Electrs.

I am connecting to Electrs with the BitBox app and have some questions about how Tor works.

Initially I was not able to get it working following the community guide. I got the error: No connection could be made because the target machine actively refused it.

After a bit of digging for answers I was able to connect. First by changing the proxy to port 9150 and running the Tor browser on my local PC. That made me realise that the Tor daemon was obviously not running when I first tried the proxy with port 9050.

I’m on Windows and had followed the guide which said to install the service, but didn’t mention anything about “running” it. So I ran Tor.exe and after a minute or so of it establishing the connection I got the message “Bootstrapped 100% (done): Done”. I then tried connecting to the node with Bitbox using port 9050 and it worked!

OK, so here are the questions:

  1. Do I just run Tor.exe (the daemon) each time I want to use the Bitbox app or do I just leave it running now?
  2. If I am meant to just use it while connected, how do I stop it?
  3. What’s the advantage to running the daemon compared to just running the Tor browser as needed?

Thanks in advance.

2

Further to this …

I just had the thought, does the service show up in Windows Task Manager, and yes it does. It was still running so I stopped it and tried connecting with Bitbox. Not surprisingly I got the “No connection could be made because the target machine actively refused it” error.

I then re-started the service in Task Manager and tried Bitbox again - SUCCESS!

If this is the best way to manage the Tor service maybe it should be added to the guide? If it’s not, please let me know how best to manage this.

Cheers :slight_smile:

3

Jeez … tough crowd.

Anyone familiar with Umbrel & Tor with a Windows client?

4

if the PC and the Umbrel are on the same LAN just use umbrel.local or the LAN IP of the Umbrel.

5

Hey, thanks. I’m aware of that. Wanting to know how it’s supposed to work for when I’m not on the local network.