Ubuntu – No internet for terminal- connect through a proxy

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:

1. Open a terminal by pressing Ctrl+Alt+T

2. Run the following (replace xenial with the release you're running if you're not on 16.04 Xenial Xerus):

   sudo -i
   echo deb http://deb.torproject.org/torproject.org xenial main > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/tor.list
   echo deb-src http://deb.torproject.org/torproject.org xenial main >> /etc/apt/sources.list.d/tor.list
   gpg --keyserver keys.gnupg.net --recv 886DDD89
   gpg --export A3C4F0F979CAA22CDBA8F512EE8CBC9E886DDD89 | apt-key add -
   apt update
   apt install tor deb.torproject.org-keyring
   exit
   

Now the Tor SOCKS 5 proxy will be running on your machine, 127.0.0.1, on port 9050. 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 like start, stop, and status 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:

1. Back up /etc/apt/sources.list and all .list files in /etc/apt/sources.list.d
2. Open a terminal by pressing Ctrl+Alt+T

3. Run the following:

   sudo -i
   apt update
   apt install apt-transport-tor
   sed -i 's/ http/ tor+http/g' /etc/apt/sources.list /etc/apt/sources.list.d/*.list
   apt update
   exit
   

4. 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:

• Host: 127.0.0.1
• Port: 9050
• Proxy type (if it asks): SOCKS5
• Username/Password (if it asks): both set to the name of the program

Proxy wrapper

Other programs, like irssi, need to use torsocks. There are two ways of doing this:

1. torsocks gives error messages:

   torsocks -i command arguments
   

2. torsocks is quiet (useful for programs like irssi that assume they fully control what's shown on the terminal):

   TORSOCKS_LOG_LEVEL=1 torsocks -i command arguments
   

The issue is that the proxy settings are not being passed to the "sudo" level. You are able to ping and wget stuff as a normal user since you have the http_proxy and https_proxy settings set for that current user. When you use sudo, those environment variables are not passed to the elevated user.

The solution is to use -E with sudo to pass on those environment variables to the elevated user.

For example, do the following:

sudo -E apt-get update

It should work.