[Discussion] should tor.streamisolation be used?

in v1.7.0 LND had a dedicated Tor instance to solve this issue: https://github.com/rootzoll/raspiblitz/issues/1604#issuecomment-923240959 for which we found that reloading, instead of restarting the tor instance solves the problem too so removed the dedicated tor@lnd instance in this PR: https://github.com/rootzoll/raspiblitz/pull/2536 for the sake simplification and to help #2419.

If there are further stability issues it can be reintroduced together with one for C-lightning.

Nb: LND has a tor.streamisolation option https://github.com/lightningnetwork/lnd/blob/9264185f5b3e446b101a09eb371634ac5ba0daf4/sample-lnd.conf#L847

; Enable Tor stream isolation by randomizing user credentials for each
; connection. With this mode active, each connection will use a new circuit.
; This means that multiple applications (other than lnd) using Tor won't be mixed
; in with lnd's traffic.
;
; This option may not be used while direct connections are enabled, since direct
; connections compromise source IP privacy by default.
; tor.streamisolation=true

have seen some reports that disabling streamisolation helped some stability problems for some users on non-raspiblitz or custom nodes, so just keeping an eye on it. From v1.7.1 tor.streamisolation=true is configured in the lnd.conf and reintroduced on every lnd restart by lnd.check.sh so to switch it off for tests would need to comment it out there.

If we would decide to not use tor.streamisolation in LND a dedicated Tor instance should be reintroduced to avoid using the same circuit as all other services over Tor. This is also applicable to C-lightning now. It has less significance if there are no Tor services shard publicly (e.g the Lightning is the only public Tor service).

As for Bitcoin Core (the other public Tor service running on the node - see bitcoin-cli getnetworkinfo) it uses Tor streamisolation by default since v0.11.0: https://bitcoin.org/en/release/v0.11.0#privacy-stream-isolation-for-tor

[nyxnor]

I mailed the creator of stem to see if there is a way to show the circuit final destination, so it would be similar to torbrowser circuit button, but on the terminal. lets see.

edit: Response linked to this https://stem.torproject.org/tutorials/examples/exit_used.html also check https://stem.torproject.org/tutorials/examples/list_circuits.html

[openoms]

It’s not an issue since we are reloading tor instead of restarting.