I have 3 laptops that all need Whonix Gateway installed on them. They will all act as routers where a machine will connect to the laptop via Ethernet and have the connection go through Tor. Each laptop has a wifi card that will connect to the Internet.
I attempted it last night on one of the laptops and got Debian Jessie installed, setup and hardened. I attempted to install Whonix following the instructions in the docs and all went well, except when I checked the log files there were errors that caused the installation to fail.
I don’t need any help with the install errors. I can dig into that and find the problem. But, the difficulty is working on these laptops and debugging is a real pain in the a**. I end up having to jump through hoops to copy the log files onto USB, transfer them to another laptop, dig through the file, and after some research go back to the laptop and attempt to solve. I usually end up having to type out long commands by hand. It’s no fun. I’m working in a shell with no WM.
Another concern I have is non of these laptops should ever connect to the Internet except via Tor. I have no idea why, he’s super paranoid, but he doesn’t want the laptops to connect to the Internet unless via Tor. Not even to install required packages. Not my decision, but hey. This makes it difficult because I have to download packages onto USB, and often end up in dependency hell. It’s very time consuming, and is made even more difficult by the clients requests.
After the failure installing last night I had to start again installing Jessie, and start over. I wasn’t sure if the failed install would cause problems if I attempted to install again so I decided to start from scratch. Again, another headache.
So, what I would ideally like to do is to create a Whonix base image on my development machines, and use that image to install on the laptops. It would be so much easier to debug. I’m not quite sure how this is done, but I have a week off work so I’m open to learning.
I’m open to suggestions on best ways to get this done. It would be nice if Whonix had an installation disk (or even a live disk) for situations where the physically isolated gateway is only used to act as a “Tor router”.