Categories
How-To Software Technical

My Quick TOR Socks / Web Proxy

I originally preformed similar steps to setup a raspberry pi for this reason, later using a very tiny Ubuntu server install.

  1. Using a clean Ubuntu / or / Debian installation (recommended, not necessary) add the following repositories to /etc/apt/sources.list: deb http://deb.torproject.org/torproject.org <DISTRIBUTION> main
  2. to figure out the name of your distribution. A quick command to run is lsb_release –c (Ubuntu) or cat /etc/debian_version (Debian)
  3. Next add the gpg key that was used to sign the TOR packages: gpg –keyserver keys.gnupg.net –recv 886DDD89
  4. Then, type sudo apt-get install deb.torproject.org-keyring
  5. Next type sudo apt-get update
  6. Next type apt-get install tor
  7. Once completed TOR will be installed and listening on port 9050 on 127.0.0.1 of the host. You will need to modify the following file /etc/tor/torrc and add your servers address and SOCKS Port to listen on.
  8. Once completed you can restart the tor service and test remotely with a machine on your network; assign a web browser the SOCKS proxy info for your server and test with: https://check.torproject.org/ if all working you will be notified that you are on the TOR network.

But what if you don’t want to use SOCKS or an application / device doesn’t have a configuration for SOCKS proxy?  Well I encounter this same thing and there is a fix for that.

Using privoxy you can proxy your data via the computers current network, a VPN tunnel and in our case a SOCKS proxy.

  1. Back onyour server type  sudo apt-get update , then sudo apt-get install privoxy
  2. Once installed you will need to edit the following file: /etc/privoxy/config
  3. You need to:
  4. add a listen address and port for your client machines to use.
  5. you need to setup a forward-socks5 connection, something like: forward-socks5  / 127.0.0.1:9050
  6. Restart the privoxy server and your good to test. As we did above, setup your web browser with the proxy settings and check the following address https://check.torproject.org/ all should be working and you have an always on TOR Network proxy.

For more info on TOR: https://www.torproject.org

 

One reply on “My Quick TOR Socks / Web Proxy”