> I may be doing a horrible job of explaining the problem. No, you're doing fine. I'm just going to explain it differently.
> IP over IP works. > UDP over UDP works if your UDP protocol supports it. > TCP over TCP fails. The timeout rules cannot stack properly. You missed the two important cases ;-) TCP over IP works (duh) TCP over UDP works This last case is why things like OpenVPN can do their job. TCP over TCP is extremely inefficient; it will cause spurious retransmissions, seriously impair the throughput you get and congest the tor network. (This does not apply to tunnelling over ssh, since ssh tunnels the higher-layer data stream rather than the TCP packets.) Juliusz