Let me qualify that tcpdump comment. I was looking For UDP traffic between the server and client which is none.
What I see is https traffic between the server and the broker (snowflake-broker.bamsoftware.com) at regular intervals. But nothing in the logs like the extension. Makes it really easy to diagnose anything and everything. I’m being facetious. I would not now what to look for in the dumps.
A comment on the forums to the admins. When do we get out of jail here?
Makes it really hard to get anywhere solving anything when you must wait a day or so for the comment to get in. I have replies on other threads that have been there for more than one day.
And how come there is no edit option (or not always there) to correct something in a post? You have to do a reply and then wait a day for the correction to appear.
Feels strange to be censored in the Tor forums whose purpose is to circumvent censorship.
Just want to note that restricted proxy won’t have as much users as unrestricted one.
People telling they have ~100 users per hour are most likely having unrestricted proxies.
It’s even worse than that: 1.1.0-2.
Who would have thought they would have a non-working application in their library? Shame on you Debian.
I’ll see about the upgrade/update options and if nothing changes then this project is a no-go.
I was convinced to do the standalone version and gave it a try on a test machine. The machine which would have hosted it is consider a production machine by me. I am not playing with it. Docker is not a consideration.
All is not lost though. It did give me an opportunity to tone up my Linux skills.
It will remain a browser extension snowflake.
So much for the presumption of innocence. Where is this forum hosted?
I read those instructions. Installing golang is not a big thing. Just another language like python. Then the git install, then the build and compile. Not for me. Not a fan of the git thing. This compile thing has never worked for me. There is always something which won’t work or missing or out of date or, or, or.
edited later:
I decided to try this out on my test machine just for the learning process and prove to myself that it is not my LAN which was the problem. I had success but not without gotchas. And I see logging. So not my LAN. Proxy version 2.92
Now that I saw the problems and can avoid them I will probably install on my production machine.
I will post here for the next person who want to do this and avoid the gotchas.
TLDR;
The good news. I transported the whole snowflake directory after the build and dumped it into the home directory of another similar test machine as my target machine. Not sure if this is a good idea but it works. Now I don’t have the baggage of all the GO and snowflake sources stuff. This is just what I wanted. KISS. I wonder why it is not supplied in this way. There were 37 completed connections in a 7 hours interval.
I’m smiling now because I’m sure I forgot some gotchas. I did not take notes. We are not all called Linus Torvalds.
If going the build method you need the GO language 1.21 or newer but don’t get it with Debian apt. It will be the wrong version… of course.
If it’s there and 1.21 or newer then you are good otherwise remove it. I made that mistake. I had to use apt to remove and purge it.
So you download the golang binary 1.23.0 because it’s not there.
The first instruction is to remove the old version but the first command rm fails since the old directory does not exist and the subsequent tar is not done. It would need a if exists statement.
Just do the tar and follow the instructions. Kudos to Google or those who maintain it. It is all in 1 folder.
The install git and subsequent build worked without a hitch.
Are there any docs to know what all those startup options do (some are obvious) and how to interpret what is in the logs. Are there settings to modify?
It seems this project worked out better than I thought. Never imagined I could get it to work without all that extra development baggage I did not want on my system.
The option I looking for was -verbose which is on now. Trial and error I guess. Hate to stop it when someone is connected and there were some. Sorry guy from Russia or Iran.
Without it you are running blind with nothing to show that all is working OK except for those 1 hour messages which are a bit misleading. Some of those connections were just a dozen of seconds or so.
Just a few more things to resolve (not snowflake related). Rotate the logs, make sure it survives a boot, and put into the 24/7 machine. And create a few scripts to analyze the logs.
Also there is lots of info in the snowflake directories. You just need to search for words
Want to see if there is traffic from the client:
sudo tcpdump -n -c 20 -i interface udp and dst host x.x.x.x
adjust 20 for the count, interface, and x.x.x.x with your LAN IP
With all that testing done the proxy is now running on my AMD 5950x machine which runs 24/7/365. It’s capped at -capacity 14 but from the comment by SirNeo above I should be able to do 100+. Something to evaluate and modify.
I happened to check my traffic with my ISP account (it’s not much ever) and since I started this experiment about 2 weeks ago it is now twice what it ever was. I won’t mention what it was because people will laugh. Curious what it will be after a full month. At last I will be using what I’ve been pay for all these years.
