regenerate_torrc widened SOCKS to the archy-net gateway whenever `podman
network inspect archy-net` reported one. Podman reporting a gateway is not
proof the host can bind it: under rootless podman the bridge and its gateway
live inside a network namespace and never appear on a host interface.
Tor binds listeners at STARTUP, not at config-check time — `--verify-config`
passes happily — so the failure lands as a refusal to start. austin-sapien,
2026-08-09:
[warn] Could not bind to 10.89.0.1:9050: Cannot assign requested address
[warn] Failed to parse/validate config: Failed to bind one of the listener ports.
[err] Reading config failed--see warnings above.
Tor then died completely — loopback SOCKS and every hidden service with it —
having run 3d 18h before something restarted it. The node's Home tab still
read "connected" because tor.service is Debian's multi-instance MASTER unit,
which is active(exited) by design; the real instance, tor@default, was failed.
Whether a node is affected is pure timing: archi-dev-box's torrc has only
`SocksPort 9050` because archy-net was not discoverable when its torrc was
last regenerated, so it fell into the loopback branch and Tor starts fine.
Nodes whose torrc was generated while archy-net was visible are one Tor
restart away from the same outage.
The gateway is now probed the way Tor will use it — bind an ephemeral port on
that exact address — and a failure falls through to the existing loopback-only
branch, which was already written and commented "fail closed". Widening SOCKS
must never be able to take the whole daemon down.
Verified on this host: 127.0.0.1 binds, 10.89.0.1 returns EADDRNOTAVAIL.
Tor restored on austin-sapien and confirmed end to end — bootstrapped 100%,
and a request through the proxy returns {"IsTor":true}.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
