[tor-talk] Connection / socket issues with Tor on Mac OS

[Robin Kipp <mlists@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi all,
so, I'd like to use Tor on my Mac, and access the web through its network of servers. So far so good, but as I'm familiar with Linux and the shell, I don't want to bring up Tor using the Vidalia GUI, but rather call it from Terminal and later on have both Tor and Polipo launched as daemons.
So, I had a look at both the Torrc.sample file (Which I then renamed to torrc and moved to /Applications/Vidalia.app/tor). Also, I had a look at polipo.conf, however didn't change any of the settings. Then, I launched Tor as follows:

Robins-MacBook-Air:MacOS owomac$ ./tor
Aug 06 20:01:55.509 [notice] Tor v0.2.1.30. This is experimental software. Do not rely on it for strong anonymity. (Running on Darwin x86_64)
Aug 06 20:01:55.512 [notice] Initialized libevent version 2.0.10-stable using method kqueue. Good.
Aug 06 20:01:55.512 [notice] Opening Socks listener on 127.0.0.1:9050
Aug 06 20:01:55.513 [notice] Parsing GEOIP file.
Aug 06 20:01:55.938 [notice] OpenSSL OpenSSL 0.9.8p 16 Nov 2010 looks like version 0.9.8m or later; I will try SSL_OP to enable renegotiation
Aug 06 20:01:57.392 [notice] We now have enough directory information to build circuits.
Aug 06 20:01:57.392 [notice] Bootstrapped 80%: Connecting to the Tor network.
Aug 06 20:01:58.635 [notice] Bootstrapped 85%: Finishing handshake with first hop.
Aug 06 20:02:02.963 [notice] Bootstrapped 90%: Establishing a Tor circuit.
Aug 06 20:02:03.924 [notice] Tor has successfully opened a circuit. Looks like client functionality is working.
Aug 06 20:02:03.924 [notice] Bootstrapped 100%: Done.

Afterwards, I launched Polipo in a separate process:
Disabling disk cache: No such file or directory
Disabling local tree: No such file or directory
Established listening socket on port 8123.

This, in itself, is already weird, as Polipo, by default, is supposed to bind to port 8118 as opposed to 8123. So then, when I configure the preferences for my network card and specify the web proxy and secure web proxy, I specify localhost as the hostname and 8123 as the port. When I confirm and apply the config changes, I can access the web just fine through Safari (I'm visually impaired, and unfortunately can't use Firefox on the Mac due to the lack of screen reader support). When I open a website such as Google in Safari after applying the new settings, the site loads just fine. However, when I open check.torproject.org, I get a message saying that I'm not using for. Also, browsing to a site like whatismyip.org shows my own IP, not the IP of a Tor server. When I change my proxy settings to port 8118, however, it doesn't work at all - Safari reports that it can't connect to the proxy. So then, I tried quitting both Tor and Polipo services and then launched the Vidalia GUI.
  This then reported that Tor was running, and in fact, when I set up proxy connectivity again and set the port to 8118, it worked just fine. I then tried removing the /Applications/Vidalia.app folder, the /Library/Vidalia folder and the ~/.tor folders. Afterwards, I tried setting up everything once again, however the issue is still present. So, when I call both the Tor and Polipo services from Terminal, Polipo obviously binds to a wrong port and seems to accept and forward connections, but they are not routed through Tor and thus Polipo isn't working properly. Only when both services are launched through the Vidalia GUI, everything seems to be just fine. So, what do I need to do in order to get them to work from Terminal?
Thanks for any help!
Robin
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