Getting TOR to work.

I'm starting to feel like a "help me I'm stupid" kind of person w/ all my questions and problems but I'm here I go again. I downloaded and installed both TOR and Privoxy. I configured them both exactly like the TOR instructions say. But when I try and access a webpage I get this 503 error saying that the connection w/ the page was not able to be established. Any ideas? I've set up my proxy address as both "localhost" and 127.0.0.1 and neither work. Thanks for any help or ridicule.

 

Okay, when you right-click the Privoxy tray icon and select "Edit" and then "Main Configuration", is the very first line at the top of the page

"forward-socks4a / localhost:9050 ."

with everything between the quotation marks there - including the spaces and period?

If so (and you're using IE for this), when you go to Tools/Internet Options/Connections/LAN Settings, "Use a Proxy Server for your LAN..." should be check-marked, the "Address" field here says "localhost" and the "Port" field has 8118 for the port. (I have neither of the boxes above that check-marked).

The instructions here: http://tor.eff.org/cvs/tor/doc/tor-doc-win32.html helped me alot.

I'm trying to ascertain here that you've got the most basic settings right. You're running Windows, right? And using IE for this? And you're not using any other proxy, right? What's your firewall brand? Router involved?

Guess we'll just feel our way through this. Pete

 

Thanks for the response. Yeah, the line in Main Configuration is as you listed it. I just cut and pasted it from the instructions. I'm using Windows XP Pro and have tried TOR w/ both Firefox and IE. I have ZA Pro latest version, Linksys non-wireless router. I've turned off my firewall and it still doesn't work. On the error message page I get it says that I'm getting a common error and to try again later it's just "later" never works either.

 

Check your ZoneAlarm logs to verify that you have the following traffic being permitted:

• Your browser connecting to Privoxy on port 8118;
• Privoxy connecting to Tor on port 9050;
• Tor connecting out to various addresses on ports 80,443 and 9000-9033.

Also check that you are using the latest version of Tor (0.0.9.1 at the time of posting) - older versions may be rejected by nodes on the network and shut down, causing the symptoms you describe.

 

I'm using the latest version of TOR but you know what? TOR started working. I don't know, I don't of anything I did different but it's working fine now. Thanks for your suggestions.

 

Wraith - I always wait to make sure I get the "Looks like it's working" message on the Tor interface before trying to start SocksCap and then the browser.

If I don't get that message the first time I start it (Tor), I'll shut Tor down and re-start it till I do - seems to smooth out everything thereafter.

Glad it started working for you! Pete