Good evening,
I'd like to take the opportunity to introduce '
The Onion Pack', a Tor Relay Bundle for Windows.
Intended to lower the effort to setup a Tor relay (or bridge) on a Windows system to almost zero, it merges the latest versions of Tor's
Windows Expert Bundle and
The Onion Box into a smart relay / dashboard system, ready to run after some minutes of installation.
Neither the Windows Expert Bundle nor The Onion Box are firmly linked into the installer yet pulled on demand.
A tray icon acts as additional user interface, providing what is necessary to control the Tor node beyond the capabilities of The Onion Box.
Being aware that this is a tool most probably dedicated to first-timers I'd be happy to receive any kind of feedback.
Just give it a try!
Hi ralph
i use it on my exit relay for two months now and i am very happy about having that nice Monitor for Windows too now so i would not want to miss it again!
But a few things:
- Is there a way to peacefully shutdown Tor?
On Linux when you reboot or shutdown Tor i see Tor is taking its time to shutdown softly but on Windows i think its just aborting everything when i click "Stop!" or when i do a reboot.
- Logfile
I have specified my own path in the torrc for the Tor logfile.
When i click on "Show Logfile..." it shows me a logfile with the first few Tor entries but not the logfile i have specified.
At the first try i was a bit confused why Tor seem to not fully start before i then realized that it is not opening the logfile i expected it to open.
- Uninstall process
Its a good functionality that you can just uninstall and install again to get the new Tor version and you dont need to care for backing up your keys but if someone wants to delete the whole thing he now need to remove them manually or they will rest on his system forever.
I saw it with other programs a few times where you can check boxes what you want to delete during the uninstallation process and i think if thats possible that would be the best solution.
- Maybe make the order of the boxes in the Monitor customizable?
I dont know if its worth the work but when you have a big exit policy specified then you need to scroll down a lot from the top where the CPU and RAM is shown through all the things which usually do not change often to the bottom to see the nice visualization of the throughput and the log messages box.
So when i want to see all important things to check the health of my relay then i usually either need to scroll a lot all the time or i need to let the browser open where the throughput is shown and have the Task-Manager open at the same time.
For me if the throughput and CPU and RAM would be at one place and the log box below it that would be the best.
Overall even if i know where to download the Tor .exe i will go on using The Onion Pack because i really love the Monitor.
Thanks!
Cheers