Here's my issue: I'm using the university internet connection quite often. The network has a firewall which blocks the connection of some programs like IRC (Xchat, Irssi), sometimes even the Software Updater and some other applications.
I've surfed on the web and found out that I can "overtake" the firewall using a Tor proxy. But the instructions on how configure it are confused and often incorrect.
Can you please help me in find out how to do that?
Thank you in advance!
Best Answer
Install the official Tor proxy
Tor and its official SOCKS 5 proxy are pretty quick to get running on Ubuntu. Going off of the Tor Project website's installation instructions, do the following:
Run the following (replace
xenial
with the release you're running if you're not on 16.04 Xenial Xerus):Now the Tor SOCKS 5 proxy will be running on your machine,
127.0.0.1
, on port9050
. Remember that this is a SOCKS 5 proxy, not an HTTP proxy.Your Tor proxy will automatically start when your machine boots. You can run
sudo service tor restart
or other actions likestart
,stop
, andstatus
to control the Tor proxy on your machine.Apt through Tor
Going off of the apt-transport-tor Github README, to get
apt
to work through Tor:/etc/apt/sources.list
and all.list
files in/etc/apt/sources.list.d
Run the following:
Make sure to fix any error messages that appear (if needed, restore the files you backed up)
Note: Be aware that some programs, like Google Chrome, will modify their
.list
file, so those programs may automatically switch back to trying to connect directly when checking for updates instead of going through Tor.In-program proxy settings
A lot of programs connect just fine through Tor if you edit the proxy settings to:
127.0.0.1
9050
SOCKS5
Proxy wrapper
Other programs, like
irssi
, need to usetorsocks
. There are two ways of doing this:torsocks
gives error messages:torsocks
is quiet (useful for programs likeirssi
that assume they fully control what's shown on the terminal):