Statistics

Greetings All:

It's been a while since I participated on a mailing list, and I did see a portion of the discussion regarding Windows servers. Ironically, I joined the list because I wanted to ask how I could setup a Windows Tor server (based on a Windows 2003 Server). One thing that may add to the complexity is that the Tor server may have to be located behind a Microsoft ISA 2004 server (on the same box). However, certain ports may be opened (my admin said "if you ask nicely").

Any links to articles or help would be appreciated (looking forward to joining one of the "unknowns" on that list.

--George

On Fri, Feb 11, 2005 at 10:32:23AM +0100, Bernhard Wiedemann wrote:

> I ran p0f for a few days using passive fingerprinting for OS detection

> and made statistics from it's record:

> 26682 Entries for Port 9001

> Windows 11990 (252 of those '98 , the remainder 2000 or XP )

> Linux 10049

> BSD 1745(Free 1308, Open 304)

It is quite interesting that a majority of Tor connections are ostensibly from Windows machines, considering that there are so few Windows machines serving as Tor servers:

zermelo.eecs.harvard.edu:~ % wget -O -

"http://serifos.eecs.harvard.edu:9030/" | grep -A 1 "^router" | awk '{print $5}' | grep "[A-Za-z]" | sort | uniq -c | sort -nr

104 Linux

12 FreeBSD

8 Unknown

6 OpenBSD

2 NetBSD

2 Darwin

Note that Windows machines refer to themselves as "Unknown", so there are probably eight of them. Closer examination reveals that four of the eight "Unknown" routers are unresponsive. This suggests to me that perhaps Windows users are running into the problem observed by spy1 on #tor... and his intuition that this may be an effective deterrent to the proliferation of Windows Tor nodes is probably accurate.

Geoff