Hi,

I just set up a virtual machine with Virtual Box, and installed Fedora 12 on it (v.12 because I already had a CD with it on). My intention was/is to set up Privoxy and Tor to use with Firefox, using the FoxyProxy add-on for Firefox.

I've done this before on Windows, and it worked fine. I guessed I might have some troubles with SELinux, and I did, so for the moment I've disabled SELinux temporarily, so that's not part of this issue.

Anyway, I downloaded and installed Tor and Privoxy, and managed to get them running okay, with no issues. Both start up alright with no errors. I also installed the FoxyProxy Basic addon for FireFox, and went through the Tor Wizard config.

For anyone familiar with FoxyProxy they will know the little orange/blue button to enable/disable FoxyProxy, and how to use it to ensure that all URLs use FoxyProxy, etc. So, when the button is blue, and twirling around, it's meant to be using the proxy which is configured for it.

Well, the button does twirl around, and there is a delay in the page fetching which is approximately equivalent to the usual length of time one waits for Tor requests, but, despite several attempts at configuring it every way I can think of, every time I check my IP address on a remote site it displays my public IP address (i.e. not a Tor address). Yet, no errors are reported anywhere, and Tor and Privoxy are definitely running.

There's also a Tor site where one can confirm, or not, if the browsing session is using Tor, and each time I test it, the site reports that I am not.

If anyone else has suffered through trying to get Tor/FoxyProxy/Privoxy working on Fedora, and has any ideas, then they would be much appreciated.

Might not be able to respond for a few days because I'll be away, but I'll definitely check on any responses when I return, and respond accordingly.

Thanks in advance!

Wrong reason. Install a distribution release because it is recent, supported and maintained which is not Fedora 12 but 17 by now.


FoxyProxy may make things easier to use but please first ensure requests going through Privoxy actually are routed through and processed by TOR by running 'curl --connect-timeout 25 --max-time 15 -s -x privoxy_addressrivoxy_port -A "Mozilla/4.0" -H 'Cache-Control: no-cache' http://some.site;' and then checking their log file contents. If unsure post, preferably in BB code tags, curl output, log excerpts and configuration file contents, the latter cleaned like this: 'grep -v ^# /etc/privoxy/config|grep .;' and the same for /etc/tor/torrc. Before posting check if you need to obfuscate any unique identifiers.

Thanks for the reply. I don't seem to even be able to get Privoxy starting now though, for some reason. The log file doesn't show anything since Thursday, when i first attempted this, which shows:

Privoxy config file is posted below:

Tor starts okay, but I'm kind of lost with this really. I guess the first thing is to actually get Privoxy running, but I've no idea why it no longer starts.

Actually, I have no need to pursue this any longer, as I managed to get the Tor bundle from the Tor website working properly, as opposed to installing the bits of software separately via yum. Thanks for your help anyway - appreciated.

In /etc/hosts 127.0.0.1 may have an alias but should have the primary name "localhost".


Thanks for letting us know. But it's a shame really because this way you haven't learned what minimal configuration services require, knowing about it might come in handy later on...