Configure a Tor proxy on Ubuntu 16.04

Question

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!

Answer 1

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