[Czerno]

Tor itself - server and client[ - is and always has been running perfectly in Windows 98 (no kernelX needed).
My own installation of Tor runs indifferently in Windows XP, 2000 or 98SE - executables and data files being shared between the 3 OSes.
(I also ran Tor under Linux with much success)

If you met problems, they must be traceable exclusively to the FF Browser, Vidalia controller and/or other cr@p, I mean additional components, included in the so-called "bundles" (which are nothing but a trial at a Tor-made-easy-for-dummies)

I've never felt the need to run a "bundle", netiher do /you/ need or want one IMNSHO. And yes I've been running (teeny) servers / relays, off and on for many, many years, without ever using more than basic Tor and ini files customised "by hand".

Tor runs correctly out of the box in Win 98, although for good operation of a relay, or a bridge, some tweaking of the TCP/IP stack params in the Windows registry is recommended (as explained on the Tor wiki.) Such tweaking in not even necessary if you only run Tor as a client.

In no case is KernelX required for running Tor.

Good luck and HTH.


--
Czerno

[herbalist]

KernelEx was installed long before I added Tor and was disabled for the Tor executable before I ever launched it. The only purpose I have for Vidalia is for the timed shutdown of Tor, last used when I updated Tor almost 2 weeks ago. Tor definitely works fine on 98 with a few tweaks, well enough that the browser on my other PC becomes extremely slow and the phone (uses a separate modem) gets erratic. Those tweaks were done some time ago and are listed in earlier posts. The question I'm trying to deal with is how long can 98 serve as an exit node and remain stable. So far, it's holding up, but GDI resources are slowly dropping, down to 49% at the moment. Memory usage is slowly going up. Memload shows Kernel32.dll is now using 9.9MB, far higher than normal. Free physical memory is down to 145.5MB. It's clear that there is a limit to how long 98 will remain stable as an exit node, but the tools I have are not pointing to what is specifically using up the memory and resources.

The only "problem" I've experienced is those log entries. There was no visible problems at the time or since. Vidalia wasn't in use. I wasn't browsing through Tor that day either. I'm looking for better information than is contained in the pages I linked to.

[dencorso]

Rick, if you want a window into Win 9x memory, do add Japheth's VWin32 to your system: it's small, works in real-time, doesn't impair stability, and gives lots of info for its small size. It may help you figure out what's happening.

[Czerno]

herbalist, on 21 January 2012 - 08:12 AM, said:

KernelEx was installed long before I added Tor and was disabled for the Tor executable before I ever launched it. The only purpose I have for Vidalia is for the timed shutdown of Tor, last used when I updated Tor almost 2 weeks ago. Tor definitely works fine on 98 with a few tweaks, well enough that the browser on my other PC becomes extremely slow and the phone (uses a separate modem) gets erratic. Those tweaks were done some time ago and are listed in earlier posts. The question I'm trying to deal with is how long can 98 serve as an exit node and remain stable. (...)

IIRC some resource leaks are known problems with Tor/Windows, not just win 9x. You might want to browse the Tor flyspray. Of course in addition, windows 98 is not known to be the best platform for supporting heavy-duty servers of any kind. How much Tor traffic are you routing ? If your goal were to run a Tor server stably for long periods unattended, Linux would be the obvious choice.

Regarding ordered server shutdown, if that is the only reason you run a controller you might consider instead sending Tor the termination signal "manually", using netcat for instance. This is how I do it, KISS :=) You could shutdown even by just typing a Control-C in Tor's window, it's not the "clean" way but it works, too ... you don't shutdown often anyway (otherwise you wouldn't experience the resource leaks).

Good luck with your Tor

[herbalist]

Quote

windows 98 is not known to be the best platform for supporting heavy-duty servers of any kind. How much Tor traffic are you routing ? If your goal were to run a Tor server stably for long periods unattended, Linux would be the obvious choice.

From what I've seen there, all of the non-server versions of Windows don't hold up well. 98 is especially bad "out of the box", but with the upgrades here it's been a very pleasant surprise. Yes, Linux would be a better choice but I don't have a free PC of any real power available to put it on. For me, Linux is like starting over, something I really don't have the time or ambition to do. In this regard, my goals conflict. I might not be able to get 98 to run 6 months continuously, but everything I'm seeing says I can get one month of reliable service. I don't see any Windows units, save a couple of servers, functioning as exit relays listed on Torstatus doing any better. In that respect, one goal has been achieved, having 98 perform at least as well as the new versions of Windows.

My traffic load is quite variable, ranging from 100MB to 2GB per day. At times there's nearly 200 established connections. I've restricted the bandwidth to 24 KB/s average and 32 KB/s maximum in order to leave enough bandwidth for the phone to work. Even at this setting, when the traffic peaks, the phone conversation cuts out. At a higher setting, it fails to ring or dial out at times. Ideally I should upgrade the DSL service but that doubles the price and doesn't double the upload speed. Not much of a selection where I live.

Netcat does look interesting. I wasn't aware of such a tool for Windows. I don't leave Vidalia running as such. I was starting it when I needed to shut Tor down cleanly. Can Netcat send a password to Tor? As for the resource leaks, I'm not certain that Tor is what's leaking. That's a large part of what I'm trying to determine. Anyone know of a resource monitor for 98 that shows the load of each process?

[herbalist]

dencorso
That does look useful. Thanks.

[Mijzelf]

AFAIK you get this error when no more sockets are available. You can use netstat to find out how much sockets are in use at any moment. For W9x the maximum is 100, but it can be increased.
http://www.catalyst.com/kb/100072

This post has been edited by Mijzelf: 22 January 2012 - 02:52 PM

[Czerno]

herbalist, on 22 January 2012 - 09:01 AM, said:

Netcat does look interesting. I wasn't aware of such a tool for Windows. I don't leave Vidalia running as such. I was starting it when I needed to shut Tor down cleanly. Can Netcat send a password to Tor?

Sure, always be sure to keep good old netcat at hand's reach, aka the "Swiss army knife" of networking !

Application to quickly shuting down Tor : first create a text file named "StopTor.bat" containing :

authenticate ""
signal shutdown
quit

Then create one (lor more) shortcuts to the StopTor bat, on the Desktop or the Start menu (for convenience). Double-click shortcut whenever you need to shut down your server!

The example assumed a blank Tor control password (not a vulnerability if the control port isn't open to the internet, which it is not by default, and local users of the computer are trusted). If you set a password though, insert it between the double quotes (authenticate line).

Quote

As for the resource leaks, I'm not certain that Tor is what's leaking. That's a large part of what I'm trying to determine. Anyone know of a resource monitor for 98 that shows the load of each process?

Process monitor and other Sysinternals tools are what come to mind (now owned by Microsoft, download from MS).

[jumper]

herbalist, on 22 January 2012 - 09:01 AM, said:

As for the resource leaks, I'm not certain that Tor is what's leaking. That's a large part of what I'm trying to determine. Anyone know of a resource monitor for 98 that shows the load of each process?

I use TaskInfo2000 v2.1 by Igor Arsenin

Amongst many other things, for each process it lists:

• Data KB (total, in memory, in use)
  
• Code KB (total, in memory, in use)
  
• Handles count
  
• Windows

It uses low resources itself, updates every two second, and shows most of what VWin32 reports (and much more).

[loblo]

Another excellent process/thread management/information utility, perhaps the best/most advanced of all, is Another Task Manager:

http://www.simtel.ne...t/view/id/12339

[herbalist]

Nice selection of tools. Thanks.

Mijzelf
According to that article, I'm set much higher than I should be at 512 but have not seen any instability. Lowering "TcpTimedWaitDelay" to 30 might be one reason. The errors have never returned. I have to believe the unofficial upgrades, primarily Revolutions Pack made that possible. I'm also wondering how much effect selecting "network server" in file system properties has here. Never took the time to check what it changes. This instance of Tor has run for 17 days now, still seems fine. Total uptime has reached 3 weeks. Both the available RAM and GDI resources have gone back up some.

I still wonder why the error messages both ended with "Not enough ram?" when MemLoad showed that I had RAM available. It also has me asking if stronger hardware would help here?

Looking at the other Dell with 2GB RAM and a 2.6GHZ P4 sitting next to this unit, wondering if the other half would notice if I swapped hardware with her.

This post has been edited by herbalist: 24 January 2012 - 10:41 AM

[herbalist]

I haven't had the chance to verify it, but I think I've found one of the items draining the RAM and/or resources. I'd forgotten that I had Kerio firewall set to log outbound Tor traffic. Needless to say, the log had become quite large. Deleting the log gave me back 25MB of RAM and available GDI resources went up 8%. The odd part here is that the decrease in RAM usage didn't show up in any of the processes listed in MemLoad but does show in in the free physical memory.

[herbalist]

After finding the issue with Kerio logs and RAM usage, I started looking for other processes that were consuming resources and RAM, shutting them down and restarting them. When I shut down SSM, available GDI resources went up to 80%. They remained there after I restarted SSM, but the system had become unstable and eventually crashed. The majority of the errors pointed to user32.dll and were general protection faults.

[herbalist]

As far as I can determine, the last crash was due to a conflict between System Safety Monitor and the latest version of Kernel Ex. Keeping these 2 compatible with each other has been problematic with Kernel Ex adding and modifying APIs and SSM hooking the same APIs. The Kernel Ex settings for the 2 primary SSM components, SysSafe.exe and mchook9x.dll, greatly affect how they interact and SSM's ability to function. This conflict appeared to be resolved with Kex 4.0 but looks to have reappeared with 4.5.2. For the moment I've left the Kex settings for mchook9x.dll on default and disabled Kex for SysSafe.exe with the "Don't use these settings in child processes" option checked.

For the most part, the gradual depletion of resources does not appear to be related to Tor, but the steady increase in RAM usage does. Before I do any more with Tor, I need to sort through the SSM-Kex interactions and determine why it resulted in so much resource depletion. While not directly related to running Tor on 98, I also need to determine how the different Kex settings for the 2 SSM components affect its ability to defend a Kex modified system. With more governments and entertainment industry watchdogs regarding Tor as a threat to their authority and/or profits, the possibility of Tor exit nodes being targeted for attack is increasing. While Kernel Ex is doing wonders for making 98 a viable system that can run todays software, its effects on 98 in regards to its vulnerability to exploits in user applications and the ability to defend against them is unexplored territory.

[CyberyogiCoWindler]

I was very unsatisfied with webproxy sites (accessed pages either don't work or links escape from the webproxy's sandbox and switch back to unprotected URLs), so I just downloaded the Tor-Vidalia bundle and tried to install it on Win98SE with KernelEx 4.5.101.

I only want to use it as a client but Vidalia 0.2.17 refuses to work and shows wrong paths (from generic English Windows, mine is German and on E: ), and worse, once I correct these by hand, it won't save them but shows the same wrong paths after every restart. When Vidalia attempts to start tor, the screen always switches into DOS text mode and exits with errors. I tried to start tor manually from a DOS box (which works only when online and loaded 10 minutes to build the "circuit" on my analogue modem), but the Tor-Button on Firefox 3.6.22 only shows a proxy error even when tor.exe in a DOS box is running. When I tried to manually start Vidalia, it requests a password to connect to the running tor process, despite I had set none. What is wrong here?

I then found out that Vidalia can only be started with an argument pointing to its data directory, which (strange enough) works only with DOS file names due to quotation mark problems. So my link has this form:
"E:\Programme\Vidalia Bundle\Vidalia\vidalia.exe" -datadir "E:\PROGRA~1\VIDALI~1\Vidalia"

So Vidalia now can save entered data, but it still refuses to keep tor running. In its debug.log I found the following error message:

Apr 14 02:25:15.630 [debug] connection_handle_write_impl(): After TLS write of 512: 0 read, 586 written
Apr 14 02:25:16.070 [warn] Error "Die Zugriffsnummer ist nicht definiert.

" occurred while polling handle for monitored process 2147483647; assuming it's dead.
Apr 14 02:25:16.070 [notice] Monitored process 2147483647 is dead.
Apr 14 02:25:16.070 [notice] Owning controller process has vanished -- exiting now.

Apparently a connection handle(?) is undefined, causing tor.exe to exit after some seconds when started by Vidalia.

- Is it possible at all to properly use Vidalia/Tor on Win98SE with analogue modem?

This post has been edited by CyberyogiCoWindler: 13 April 2012 - 06:53 PM

[herbalist]

Starting in version 0.2.16, Vidalia uses a different location for its data directory.
From the changelog:

Quote

Make the default data directory in windows be located in the Local
AppData instead of the Roaming one. Fixes bug 2319.

On my system, when Vidalia .2.17 starts, it creates C:\application data\vidalia and no longer uses /windows/application data/vidalia. It appears other data and config file locations have also changed. Some of the paths are not found on 98 units. So far, I haven't managed to get Vidalia .2.17 to work properly. Vidalia has been something of a problem on 98, even when it did work. Version 0.2.15 works fairly well. If you really want Vidalia, try that version. I stopped using Vidalia. IMO, it's more trouble than it's worth. For all purposes, Vidalia is nothing more than a GUI, log reader, and configuration file editor for Tor. On 98, the Vidalia network map is unreliable, works part time. For the message log data, Tor can just as easily send that data to file.