make TorChat work with a preconfigured hidden service

[adrelanos]

Hi,

I am adrelanos, Whonix is my project, an anonymous general purpose operating system.
http://whonix.sourceforge.net/

It runs on two (virtual) machines. One acts as a gateway and one as a workstation. The gateway runs Tor and the firewall, has two network cards, one for communicating with the internet and one solely for communicating with the worksation on an isolated network. The workstation can only access external servers through Tor. The setup fails closed and non-Tor traffic leaks are impossible.

Because Tor is already installed but runs on another machine, TorChat would have to use a preconfigured hidden service.

Hidden services run fine in Whonix, which is a transparent / isolating proxy. Here is a configuration example:
https://sourceforge.net/p/whonix/wiki/OptionalConfigurations/#hosting-hidden-services
https://github.com/adrelanos/Whonix/blob/master/whonix_workstation/usr/local/bin/hiddenserver-install

Cheers,
adrelanos

[adrelanos]

I think it's related to #26.

[adrelanos]

I got it working in Whonix. Using TorChat1 (python version) from the Debian Wheezy repository.

I installed an empty Tor package to prevent the TorChat package pulling the Tor dependency.

Added to /etc/tor/torc on the Gateway.
(https://github.com/adrelanos/Whonix/blob/development/whonix_gateway/etc/tor/torrc)

HiddenServiceDir /var/lib/tor/torchat_service/
HiddenServicePort 11009 192.168.0.11:11009

SocksPort 192.168.0.10:9119

/home/user/.torchat/torchat.ini
(https://github.com/adrelanos/Whonix/blob/development/whonix_workstation/home/user/.torchat/torchat.ini)

[client]
listen_interface = 192.168.0.11
listen_port = 11009
own_hostname = <your onion hostname without the .onion ending>

[tor]
tor_server = 192.168.0.10
tor_server_control_port = 9119
tor_server_socks_port = 9119

[tor_portable]
tor_server = 192.168.0.10
tor_server_control_port = 9119
tor_server_socks_port = 9119

I hope no changes, which could break the "Tor not running on localhost, but running on a local lan machine" thing will be introduced.