How to Use Azureus with Tor Hidden Service Bittorrent Tracker

[yancm@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx]

What follows are somewhat generic instructions for coexistant
conections to tor and public bittorrent trackers with support for
private ip based trackers maintained as well.

In my opinion, it would be helpful if one could choose to
proxy only tor (.onion) tracker addresses within Azureus,
but with Privoxy (see below) this can be accomplished.

My set-up is atypical in that I sit behind a NetBSD (*nix)
firewall, so I can't describe everything in firsthand detail,
but I can describe the steps. Azureus has made this easy
as of version 2.3.0.0 or higher.

1) Get the tor client from:
   http://tor.eff.org/download.html

   There are versions for win32, Mac OS and Linux
   plus source if you are on something else and you want
   to run on it.

2) Get privoxy from:
   http://www.privoxy.org/ then "download" which takes you to:
   http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=11118

3) Install and configure tor/privoxy to work with a web browser:
   http://tor.eff.org/documentation.html

   Hint: You know it's working if you enter the following
   url in your web browser and you actually find a web page:
   http://6sxoyfb3h2nvok2d.onion/tor/SocatHelp

***********************************************************
* NOTE: I assume you have tor listening on localhost:9050 *
* and privoxy listening on localhost:8118 in the          *
* discussion that follows.                                *
***********************************************************
4) If you got this far, you know you had to insert a line
   in the privoxy "config" file similar to the following:

    forward-socks4a / localhost:9050 .

   This line instructs privoxy to route all requests through
   the tor network.

   This is a highly anonymous configuration, but it has at least
   two drawbacks. For web browsing, if you route all of your pages
   through tor, the latency can be very annoying if you don't need
   anonymity. For Azureus tracker traffic, anonymity on the tracker
   and the associated latency doesn't seem to be that big of an
   issue (I'm still testing...no problems so far) BUT if you use
   private trackers that use IP for entry and statistics
   identification, you cannot route that tracker's traffic
   through tor.

   So here are two alternative config lines for privoxy
   that you may want to consider.

   Option 1:
   Replace
    forward-socks4a / localhost:9050 .
   with
    forward / .
    forward-socks4a .onion localhost:9050 .
   What does this do?: Only routes .onion addresses
   through the tor network.
   Impact: Minimal, if you route your tracker traffic and
   web browser through privoxy with this ruleset, you can
   use the anonymous tracker(s) along side normal trackers.

   Option 2:
   Replace
    forward-socks4a / localhost:9050 .
   with
    forward-socks4a / localhost:9050 .
    forward .private.tracker1.com .
    forward .private.tracker2.com .
    forward .private.tracker3.com .
   What does this do?: Routes everything except private tracker
   (or web sites I suppose) through the tor network.
   Impact: Big, if you route your tracker traffic and
   web browser through privoxy with this ruleset,
   you can use the anonymous tracker(s) along side normal
   trackers, but everything, except private tracker addresses,
   gets anonymized through tor. Latency is high which may be
   undesireable for casual web browsing, but seems to have
   little impact on Azureus getting tracker statistics.

   I've chosen Option 2, but I use a seperate web browser
   (Internet Exploder) to run through privoxy and use my
   main web browser (Mozilla) without privoxy for most web browsing.

5) Configure Azureus to use privoxy as it's tracker
   communications proxy. Open Tools->Options, I think it
   opens to Connections scroll down and enter you privoxy
   information. Here's what mine looks like:
   http://img38.echo.cx/img38/2520/azprivoxy3hn.jpg

   While you are here. If you have not done so already,
   change your "Incoming TCP Listen Port" to something
   other than the default, since many isp's block or throttle
   this back. Ideally choose a random port between 30000 and 55000
   - PLEASE don't just copy mine!

  **Don't forget to adjust your firewall(s) to reflect
    this change.

You'll need to restart Azureus (be sure to stop any active torrents if you
are on a ratio site so your uploads get credited to you). When you come
back up, you should be able to use anonymous trackers that use the tor
(onion) network!