.onion site help

[theblackcarl]

Hi,

I’ve been reading a lot of documentation on here and it’s been extremely helpful. I finally got my VPN up and running with Whonix using Mullvad.
Here’s a look at my set up:

Running 2 VM’s (Whonix GW and WS). Before I fire up the gateway, I have a VPN connected on my host first. So I suppose it looks like this:

Host > VPN > TOR GW/WS VM’s > VPN > Internet ?

My question is: How do I access .onion sites after chaining the VPN through TOR?
I read this article https://www.whonix.org/wiki/TestVPN
and took this snippet “Because you can not access .onion domains when a VPN has be chained. (user -> Tor -> VPN)”

Shouldn’t it be possible to work around this?

I hope I didn’t destroy this explanation. Hopefully, you understand my set up.

Thanks!

[Patrick]

Unless you use Tor over Tor, which is recommended against (https://www.whonix.org/wiki/DoNot#Prevent_Tor_over_Tor_scenarios.), there is no workaround. This is because connections to Tor hidden services stay within the Tor network. Therefore it’s not possible to exit through a VPN in between.

[theblackcarl]

Ok. Just to be clear, if I were to run the Tor browser without a socks port set, I would then be running Tor over Tor since the Whonix-Gateway doesn’t have transparent proxy enabled by default, correct?

[Patrick]

Both incorrect.

[theblackcarl]

Wow, then I really have no idea what I’m doing.

[Patrick]

Whether it’s Tor over Tor or not has to do with if Tor gets started on the workstation or not. See footnote at https://www.whonix.org/wiki/Tor_Browser#Whonix_Proxy_Settings. (TOR_SKIP_LAUNCH) Not with SocksPort vs TransPort.

Whonix-Workstation has the transparent proxying feature enabled by default [it’s a setting on Whonix-Gateway. (You could disable it if you wanted to.) Whonix-Gateway has by default no transparent proxying feature. [You could enable it if you wanted to.] Some more info: https://www.whonix.org/wiki/Whonix-Gateways_Own_Traffic_Transparent_Proxy