Running Multiple Instances of TOR under Windows

Sometimes I need to appear as a users from a certain country to use certain services. Instead of signing up for various VPN solutions or searching for appropriate proxies, I have been using TOR for a long time already to accomplish this.

However, I have gotten wary of configuring the exit nodes for each country and having to restart TOR every time I need to “switch countries”.

So, here’s the remedy:

Instead of specifying explicit exit nodes in your torrc file, use country names, for example:

ExitNodes {US}

to appear as coming from the US.

To avoid restarting TOR, I run multiple instances of TOR at the same time. To do this, you have to make sure they listen on different ports (obviously :-)) and under Windows you also need to specify a different data directory, so the instances don’t conflict. Only specifying a different pidfile does not do the job!

Just add

DataDirectory “C:\path to your diectory”

to the command line starting TOR. Unfortunately there is no way to do this from the torrc file.

To make things really comfortable, finally run TOR as a service using srvany.exe. You can have as many TOR services as you want. And you don’t have to worry about starting TOR any longer.

Once caveat: TOR needs full control on the data directory, i. e. the account under which you run the service needs full control on it.

And one last remark: don’t install TOR as a service using its command line option! This way you can only have a single instance of TOR running, and Vidalia checks whether you have TOR installed as a service, in which case it refuses to start TOR completely.