VPN - TORBB.

Hey everyone.

The other day reading through these posts, someone mentioned using a VPN + Tor Browser Bundle. Out of interest to see if this worked, I tried it. I am not completely sure im doing it correctly though.

This is what im doing.

I have the BolehVPN GUI running and connected to a server through "FullyRouted". Next, I open Tor Browser Bundle and open the TOR firefox, which opens TOR which connects to the TOR network. I tried to test it and through TOR-Firefox my IP was shown coming from the TOR network and would change every so often to different TOR servers on the network when refreshed. I could also open my "Non-Tor" normal firefox and my IP would be shown as my BolehVPN IP.

I was wondering if this is what the poster meant by useing TOR through a VPN connection.

Does this work without any extra config? Just like any other application running on my computer going out through BolehVPN?

This has been a very interesting experiment for me and im just wondering if im doing it correctly.

 

Yes, it sounds like you are. You checked at -https://check.torproject.org/-, right?

You could also route a Tails LiveCD session through the VPN, if you ran it as a VM.

 

Nice, so just having a VPN on means everything on the PC even TORBB will route through it? I did notice something strange that you may be able to explain. In the BolehVPN GUI its logs of user in and out data, it said that my upload was more then my download. It has 100MB Downloaded / 4GB Uploaded, after about 2-3 hours of messing around with TOR and trying some .onion links, pretty un-interesting but whatever. Any ideas why my upload was so high and not my download? even though my download did slowly rise like you would expect from a slow TOR connection, the upload is whats confuseing me. Thanks for your reply

I hoped i got it correct as i did not want any weird people from the TOR network to be able to get my real IP info, no wonder the problems that would cause.

 

As far as I'm aware YES every thing will route through your VPN.

 

Yes, that's standard for VPN "anonymity" services. It's not default OpenVPN behaviour, however. By default, only specified traffic is routed. That's good for branch office setups, where you may not want all Internet traffic using the VPN. The OpenVPN setting "redirect-gateway def1" routes all traffic through the VPN.

I'm not sure. You could ask on the tor-talk list, or search the archives. There's lots of negotiation with Tor, but 4BG up vs 100MB down seems odd.

Edit: 100KB to 100MB

 

I know, also it was 100MB down, not KB. It may well just be my VPN's GUI bugging out. Whatever the matter, I did have TORBB up, so even if my VPN failed, at least TORx3 still worked.

 

You can also connect to Tor first, and then connect to the VPN through Tor. There are pros and cons to both methods.

PD