3 Special Hostnames in Tor
8 Most of the time, Tor treats user-specified hostnames as opaque: When
9 the user connects to www.torproject.org, Tor picks an exit node and uses
10 that node to connect to "www.torproject.org". Some hostnames, however,
11 can be used to override Tor's default behavior and circuit-building
14 These hostnames can be passed to Tor as the address part of a SOCKS4a or
15 SOCKS5 request. If the application is connected to Tor using an IP-only
16 method (such as SOCKS4, TransPort, or NatdPort), these hostnames can be
17 substituted for certain IP addresses using the MapAddress configuration
18 option or the MAPADDRESS control command.
22 SYNTAX: [hostname].[name-or-digest].exit
25 Hostname is a valid hostname; [name-or-digest] is either the nickname of a
26 Tor node or the hex-encoded digest of that node's public key.
28 When Tor sees an address in this format, it uses the specified hostname as
29 the exit node. If no "hostname" component is given, Tor defaults to the
30 published IPv4 address of the exit node.
32 It is valid to try to resolve hostnames, and in fact upon success Tor
33 will cache an internal mapaddress of the form
34 "www.google.com.foo.exit=64.233.161.99.foo.exit" to speed subsequent
38 www.example.com.exampletornode.exit
40 Connect to www.example.com from the node called "exampletornode."
44 Connect to the published IP address of "exampletornode" using
45 "exampletornode" as the exit.
49 SYNTAX: [digest].onion
51 The digest is the first eighty bits of a SHA1 hash of the identity key for
52 a hidden service, encoded in base32.
54 When Tor sees an address in this format, it tries to look up and connect to
55 the specified hidden service. See rend-spec.txt for full details.
59 SYNTAX: [string].noconnect
61 When Tor sees an address in this format, it immediately closes the
62 connection without attaching it to any circuit. This is useful for
63 controllers that want to test whether a given application is indeed using
64 the same instance of Tor that they're controlling.
66 5. [XXX Is there a ".virtual" address that we expose too, or is that
67 just intended to be internal? -RD]