Dependencies: You're going to need openssl (0.9.6 will work fine, possibly 0.9.5 also) and popt installed. If you're on Linux, everything will probably work fine. If you're not, you're on your own (but let us know how it goes). If you got the source from cvs: Run "./autogen.sh", which will run the various auto* programs and then run ./configure for you. From there, you should be able to run 'make' and you'll be on your way. If you got the source from a tarball: Run ./configure and make as usual. There isn't much point in 'make install' yet. If this doesn't work for you / troubleshooting: If you couldn't find popt (eg you're on BSD), try CPPFLAGS="-I/usr/local/include" LDFLAGS="-L/usr/local/lib" \ ./configure rather than simply ./configure. Check out the list archives at http://archives.seul.org/or/dev/ and see if somebody else has reported your problem. If not, please subscribe and let us know what you did to fix it, or give us the details and we'll see what we can do. Once you've got it compiled: It's a bit hard to figure out what to do with the binaries. If you want to just run a local onion proxy, go into src/config and look at the oprc file. You can run an onion proxy by "../or/or -f oprc". In another window, run something like "../httpap/httpap -f httpaprc -p 9051". See below for how to use it. If you want to set up your own test network, go into src/config/ and look at the routers.or file. Also in that directory are public and private keys for various nodes (*-public, *-private) and configuration files for the nodes (*-orrc). You can generate your own keypairs with the orkeygen program, or use the provided ones for testing. Once you've got your config files ready, you're ready to start up your network. I recommend using a screen session (man screen), or some other way to handle many windows at once. I open a window for each onion router, go into the src/config directory, and run something like "../or/or -f moria2-orrc". In yet another window, I run something like "../httpap/httpap -f httpaprc -p 9051". How to use it: From here, you can point your browser/etc at localhost:9051 and treat it as a web proxy. As a first test, you might telnet to it and enter "GET http://seul.org/ HTTP/1.0" (without the quotes), followed by a pair of carriage returns (one to separate your request from the headers, and another to indicate that you're providing no headers). For more convenient command-line use, I recommend making a ~/.wgetrc with the line http_proxy=localhost:9051 Then you can do things like "wget seul.org" and watch as it downloads from the onion routing network. For fun, you can wget a very large file (a megabyte or more), and then ^z the wget a little bit in. The onion routers will continue talking for a while, queueing around 500k in the kernel-level buffers. When the kernel buffers are full, and the outbuf for the AP connection also fills, the internal congestion control will kick in and the exit connection will stop reading from the webserver. The circuit will wait until you fg the wget -- and other circuits will work just fine throughout. Then try ^z'ing the onion routers, and watch how well it recovers. Then try ^z'ing several of them at once. :)