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Install The Tor Project's snowflake-proxy on a Raspberry Pi

Your Raspberry Pi can join The Tor Project network that helps Russians read censored news sites, including Twitter.

These are all the commands necessary to spin up a Snowflake proxy that gives Tor users a way around government attempts to block access.

You can also run a Snowflake proxy from your web browser with Firefox or Chrome. Standing it up on your Raspberry Pi is a way to support the system 24 hours a day. And, unlike other Tor server setups, it doesn't require a static IP address.

# Install the Go programming language
sudo apt update
sudo apt install -y golang-go
# Download the Snowflake proxy code
git clone https://git.torproject.org/pluggable-transports/snowflake.git
# Move into the proxy code directory
cd snowflake/proxy
# Set a location for the log
LOG="$(pwd)/snowflake.log"
# Start up the proxy to run silently in the background while outputting its activity to the log
nohup ./proxy >"$LOG" 2>&1 &
@sidawson
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failed installing golang:

Reading state information... Done
by package 'golang-go:amd64'
dpkg-maintscript-helper: error: file '/usr/lib/go/pkg/linux_amd64/golang.org/x/crypto' not owned by package 'golang-go:amd64'
dpkg-maintscript-helper: error: file '/usr/lib/go/pkg/linux_amd64/golang.org/x/crypto/hkdf.a' not owned by package 'golang-go:amd64'

Obviously I can google the hell out of this - but in the middle of a massive work project. If I could have done this in two mins, I would (of course), just don't have time for debugging go installs right now.

Dunno if it's going to affect anyone else - but wanted to let you know so you could tweak instructions if necessary (to save those who aren't able to debug apt install errors).

@palewire
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palewire commented Apr 1, 2022

failed installing golang:

Reading state information... Done by package 'golang-go:amd64' dpkg-maintscript-helper: error: file '/usr/lib/go/pkg/linux_amd64/golang.org/x/crypto' not owned by package 'golang-go:amd64' dpkg-maintscript-helper: error: file '/usr/lib/go/pkg/linux_amd64/golang.org/x/crypto/hkdf.a' not owned by package 'golang-go:amd64'

Obviously I can google the hell out of this - but in the middle of a massive work project. If I could have done this in two mins, I would (of course), just don't have time for debugging go installs right now.

Dunno if it's going to affect anyone else - but wanted to let you know so you could tweak instructions if necessary (to save those who aren't able to debug apt install errors).

@sidawson Did you use sudo?

@sidawson
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sidawson commented Apr 1, 2022

I was root at the time (yes, yes, I know). So no, but essentially, yes.

There was a ton (10?) of identical errors immediately following, too. All just "not owned by package..."

@palewire
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palewire commented Apr 1, 2022

I was root at the time (yes, yes, I know). So no, but essentially, yes.

There was a ton (10?) of identical errors immediately following, too. All just "not owned by package..."

Kay. I think it's probably.some issue with your os and go not getting along. I'd bet this computer a few years old, yes?

I think you can probably get around this by avoiding apt and installing from source instead. Try this: https://www.jeremymorgan.com/tutorials/raspberry-pi/install-go-raspberry-pi/

@sidawson
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sidawson commented Apr 1, 2022

Well, it's a Debian VM (so god knows what the hardware is), running kernel 5.10.13-x86_64 - so, not THAT old (4mo?), on debian 11.2 (5mo?). I'd get you more info, but my provider is being a bit of a dick with their logins, and, crazy busy right now, sorry.

I guess I'll try updating it all, when I have time, and give it another bash. Thanks for your time though, I appreciate it. I hope no-one else has this nonsense happen.

@sidawson
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sidawson commented Apr 1, 2022

ok, figured what the problem is, I'm x86_64, there's no x86_64 golang package (thanks go!):

$ hostnamectl
 [bits snipped, for obvious reasons]
         Icon name: computer-vm
           Chassis: vm
    Virtualization: kvm
  Operating System: Debian GNU/Linux 11 (bullseye)
            Kernel: Linux 5.16.13-x86_64
      Architecture: x86-64

$ apt install golang-go:x86_64
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree... Done
Reading state information... Done
E: Unable to locate package golang-go:x86_64

therefore apt tries to get amd64, which pukes in all the above ways. So, no go for me (see what I did there?).

@palewire
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palewire commented Apr 1, 2022

Have you tried a source installation? I see an x86_64 one here https://go.dev/dl/

@sidawson
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sidawson commented Apr 2, 2022

No, but I'm also not committed enough to want to have yet another thing to manually maintain. If I can install and it'll run (& more importantly, update) itself (as part of system updates), that's one thing. But yet another maintenance task? Nope, sorry.

@alpha14
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alpha14 commented Apr 25, 2022

@sidawson There is also a docker alternative that you can run on your raspberry Pi: https://gist.github.com/palewire/52504f4a52d8173935d5f0cf638d0280

@MOTSM-HD
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i've run this shell script several times now (always rm-ing the created files and folders) on my RPi 3.
cat snwoflake.log
always prompts
nohup: failed to run command './proxy': No such file or directory
what am i missing?

@90N45-d3v
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@MOTSM-HD You first have to build the Snowflake proxy with the following commands in the /snowflake/proxy path:
go get
go build

Run every command in the script yourself and run these two commands after cd snowflake/proxy

Or use my fixed version

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