Got a warning about Tor

So I got this warning after updating to Knots 29.2. Anyone know what’s up with that? I'm using the same bitcoin.conf that I've always used. Everything seems to be running smoothly, but I'm a bit anxious that I might be exposing something or that someone could connect to my computer or node. Just to give you some context, my node is set up on Debian. I want to contribute to the network while keeping my privacy intact and preventing folks from accessing my stuff beyond just serving the network. How can I secure this better and why is this warning popping up now even though I haven't changed anything? From what I gather, Tor won’t work unless I set listen=1, so I made sure to do that. I also have onlynet=onion, which ensures I'm only interacting with other Tor nodes, stopping any clearnet IP leaks. I set discover=0 but can’t really recall why it's there. For rpc and bind, I remember reading that using localhost instead of 0.0.0.0 is better for privacy. The proxy is set to the Tor port, I think that’s necessary to create the onion service. I mean, everything seems fine. I'm getting the onion cookie, and my node appears on bitnodes.io, so it looks like it's all good. I just want to make sure I'm not messing something up here. The last thing I want is for someone to connect to my machine or for me to leak anything in a Tor setup, and this warning has me scratching my head. Any advice?

It's one of the changes in this commit from Core that Knots also implemented. Bitcoin Core PR link: github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/pull/22729 Bitcoin Knots Release Notes link: github.com/bitcoinknots/bitcoin/blob/29.x-knots/doc/release-notes/release-notes-28.0.md As the message suggests, you just need to add another config containing "=onion" after your bind setting like this: bind=127.0.0.1:8334=onion -edit- Fixed Knots release notes link

Sorry for going a little off topic but what about this one? I got this a few days ago, and I forgot to post about it. What exactly happened! I was running Bitcoin core, but had to close it, later that same day maybe after some hours when I reopened the the core, I got these two errors. Is it because I did not closed core properly? Or were it running in the background? After a quick restart everything was back to normal.

Was tor still running and just Core wasn't? I think I usually reset this error by closing and reloading tor - it's likely the lock on the listening port is being held by the version that didn't close properly. But you can refresh that by restarting tor.

I would be worried too, next time I think it is better to ask before taking any steps? It could be too late already if something was supposed to happened. Exposure at the exit node is real, traffic can leave the Tor network and becomes u encrypted and this will leave a room for malicious exit nodes to intercept unencrypted data,  before yoh know what's going on your personal details and sensitive data is gone.

It's hard to give an accurate answer to this. It could be the next reply that the "zombie process" is still using the port, but usually, it'll also lock the datadir which would've displayed a different error. The best advice that i can give is to check your debug.log for relevant errors/warnings at the time of that incident.

This is not correct. There is no "exposure" to the exit node. When using listenonion=1 and onlynet=onion, you're not connecting to clearnet, and therefore, there is no Tor node to "exit" anything. When connecting to an onion address, you're fully encrypting everything transferred to the onion address' public key, so it's impossible for intermediary nodes of the network to decrypt it. Is there any reason you're binding to 0.0.0.0? Did you just leave that value to not have any connection problems?

I didn't do anything at all. Did not touched any setting, everything was on default. I had to do a fresh installation of Bitcoin core a few months ago (the whole process of downloading and verifying), because I messed up somewhere while tweaking some setting. And while I was at it, I faced it. It was only a one time error, never encountered it a 2nd time, so I didn't paid much attention to it. Recently I got curious and asked about it in this thread.   My mistake, I did added one thing, maxuploadtarget, but nothing beyond that.