Re: privoxy problem on OpenBSD

[slrner@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx]

I replied earlier to the 3 responses that I got on this list, but that
message seems to have gotten lost in the aether.  No matter, for I
have new information on this issue.  The status on my system appears
now to be:

On OpenBSD 3.6, using lynx from the base install, Firefox, and privoxy
from either ports or packages, and TOR 0.9.2 compiled from tgz:

1. Firefox -> privoxy hangs after a few urls

2. Firefox -> TOR works fine.

3. Firefox -> privoxy -> TOR hangs after a few urls.

4. lynx -> TOR does not work - this is a feature; it needs privoxy.

5. lynx -> privoxy works fine.
	the link visited shows up in /etc/privoxy/logfile,
	and ads show up as "Killed-http..."

6. lynx -> privoxy -> TOR works fine.
	checked that privoxy kills ads, 
	no leak warning occurs from TOR
	proxy checking sites show a TOR node as my IP address

In his post Chris Palmer confirmed 1. and 3. above.

To answer Roger's questions:
Roger Dingledine wrote:
>On Thu, Jan 27, 2005 at 05:21:09AM -0000, slrner@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
>> >If I enable privoxy as well as TOR, the first one or 2 selected links
>> >will download, and thereafter it will hang forever.  The fact that
>> >it works for a few links suggests to me that the configuration is
>> >correct.
>
>Does just using Privoxy (without Tor) work?

No, it has the same problem.

>Do the privoxy logs indicate anything different or unusual when you add
>Tor into the loop?

No.

********

Notes on usage:

It is possible to call lynx with a -cfg CONFIG_FILE flag to determine
at run time whether privoxy is used (by using different config files).
It is not possible to change whether privoxy calls TOR, though,
without killing privoxy, altering /etc/privoxy/config to add the line
with: forward-socks4a / localhost:9050 .  and restarting privoxy.

It is possible to have multiple profiles for Firefox, so I have
one with no proxy for fast downloads of large files (for instance), and
an almost-anonymous one (with DNS leaks) with TOR.

So I have a work-around.  I can get text-only browseing with lynx
with full anonymity, and graphical browsing with DNS leaks.

I can't tell where the problem is.  The most likely possibility
appears (to me) to be Firefox, which is 0.8.  The current release is
1.0.  Upgrading might not be straightforward.  It is also possible,
however, that it is a privoxy problem that Firefox (and evidently
Konqueror) triggers, or a TOR problem, that Firefox and privoxy
trigger.  Finally, it may be an OpenBSD 3.6 problem.

I'll probably wait for OpenBSD 3.7 and see if the problem goes away,
or I'll try to use socat.

Thanks again to Roger Dingledine, Chris Palmer and Stephan Schmieder
for their helpful responses.

I now have questions about socat, but since privoxy is no longer
involved, I'll start a new thread for that.

Thanks

SLRNer