Running Snowflake Proxy on Tails

Support Relay Operator
1

I have a (possibly dumb) question. As soon as I heard about Snowflake, I decided to run a Snowflake proxy. My default system is Tor Browser on TailsOS, so I installed the proxy as described on Tor Project | Debian. When I check Status, I always see :
Mar 16 04:35:39 amnesia snowflake-proxy[14012]: 2026/03/16 04:35:39 In the last 1h0m0s, there were 0 connections. Traffic Relayed ↑ 0 KB, ↓ 0 KB.

I had occasion to log in to a different OS (Ubuntu) one day about a week ago, where I also installed Snowflake, and saw plenty of active use of the proxy that time.

I am happy to continue running the proxy on TailsOS if it is of any use to anyone. Is it?

1 Like
2

I have read here that running 2 proxies from the same IP was not a good idea. Don’t remember why. I assume you meant from the same IP.

Do you always get 0 connections from the one on TailsOS? Then maybe it is not much use.

3

Yes. So far, I have only ever seen 0 connections on TailsOS.

I suppose it would have been from the same IP address. I had been running the proxy in TailsOS for a week or two, with 0 connections, and then when I booted into Ubuntu on the same computer, I regularly saw connections.

4

OH! I misunderstood. I thought you were running 2 computers.
Keep the Ubuntu. This is what I use.

5

I prefer to use TailsOS.

I used about 15 different Linux distributions over about 10 years before I settled on Ubuntu, which I then used exclusively for about 7 or 8 years, and for the last few years, I normally use TailsOS.

6

Have you checked if there’s firewall logs in dmesg? Like:

[   29.626047] Dropped outbound packet: IN= OUT=eth0 SRC=fe80::0001 DST=ff02::0002 LEN=48 TC=0 HOPLIMIT=255 FLOWLBL=9415 PROTO=ICMPv6 TYPE=133 CODE=0 UID=0 GID=0

iirc Tails blocks most program’s network access attempts from physical interfaces, because that would risk letting programs run on Tails to leak network traffic outside Tor.

7

No, I haven’t. I tried to run the Snowflake proxy to provide anonymity to others as suggested by the Tor Project. I followed instructions, saw that there were no connections, and tried to resolve the problem. I won’t spend any more time on this issue. Thanks for your suggestions anyway.

8

It is actually okay to run multiple Snowflake proxies from the same IP. It just turns you into a more eager volunteer since Snowflake works by periodically reaching out to the broker to check if any censored users need a connect-back. With multiple proxies behind the same IP, you will essentially end up reaching out to the broker more frequently. The standalone Snowflakes reach out much more often than the extension-based Snowflakes (for obvious reasons). Other benefits of doing this involve better fault tolerance (in case one of your devices go down), and load distribution.

9

No, you should not run Snowflake proxy on TailsOS.

According to the TailsOS website.

Everything you do on the Internet from Tails goes through the Tor network.

Firstly this means that UDP will not work, and Snowflake client<->proxy connection is UDP-based (WebRTC, DTLS).

Secondly this means that the client would have to connect to you through a Tor exit node (because that would be your public IP). If someone is using a Snowflake client this is most likely because Tor is blocked for them, which usually means that all known Tor nodes are blocked for them by IP, which means that they will not be able to connect to you.

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10

Thanks, @WofWca .

I have been using Tails as my everyday OS for some time now. When I received the email promoting the installation and use of the Snowflake plugin and/or standalone application, I was in a position to respond to the need for anonymisation.

It seems that one key piece of information was missing from the Snowflake promotional email: It can only be used in OSs other than Tails.