Two Internet connections - how bind/lock Tor to use only one of them?

Question

As the title says - I have two network interfaces on my computer and I want to bind/lock Tor to strictly use only one of them. How do I achieve that?

I tried doing it with the application "ForceBindIP" ( http://old.r1ch.net/stuff/forcebindip/ ), but it didn´t work. The starting window of Tor (Tor Status. Connecting to the Tor network) freezes for about half a minute and the green colured progression meter never shows up. Then a message is displayed - "Could not connect to Tor control port".

Experimenting further with "ForceBindIP" I immediately got it to work perfectly well with other "normal" web browsers like Chrome and Opera.

My OS is Windows 7 and Tor Browser 4.0.2

What am I missing out here?

Your help is highly appreciated. Thanks a lot in advance!

Answer 1

From Tor's manual:

OutboundBindAddress IP

Make all outbound connections originate from the IP address specified. This is only useful when you have multiple network interfaces, and you want all of Tor’s outgoing connections to use a single one.

If Tor's process is running locally that should be it. Don't use ForceBindIP with Tor. All the binding settings can be configured in torrc. Mostly this is for your protection. The default control port and socks port binds to localhost. So you should only have to worry about OutboundBindAddress unless you have special needs from your system configuration.

torrc can be found in Browser/TorBrowser/Data/Tor/ if you use Tor Browser or Data/Tor/ if you use Tor standalone.

-- leeroy

Answer 2

If you're using Ubuntu Linux there's three steps to do what you want :

• Your reverse host name (type hostname to find out) must be set STRICTLY to the IP of the interface you're using
• In IPtables allow traffic from user you're running Tor under from desired interface ONLY, AND disable it through undesired one. Helps to solve alot of "freezings"
• Use ALL the ip-binding config directives listed below, found it out myself in a hard way :
• ORPort IP:port
• OutboundBindAddress IP
• DirPort IP:port
• ServerTransportListenAddr transport IP:port

the tricky case if your desired interface is like pppX, where IP can be changed. In this case use a script to re-configure Tor through it's ControlPort telnet protocol if you need it on-flight, or re-generate torrc and send SIGHUP (killall -1 tor) to reload your config. That's it!