Solve TOR blocking problem & solution

Yesterday I noticed my bitcoin node started lagging behind. It was quite late so I decided to sort it out today. After some troubleshooting with the node itself I started suspecting that the problem could be with the access to the TOR network, since the TOR browser itself would get stuck.

This is a step-by-step guide of what I did to solve this issue.

First just install this. I'm not sure this was already installed or was needed at all, but it was part of the things I tried and I'm really not sure how relevant it was.

sudo apt install obfs4proxy

Then go to https://bridges.torproject.org/ and obtain a TOR bridge (jump straight to step 2)

It should give you a few lines like this. This is the TOR bridge IP, port, key and other information. It should not be published so I'll just use placeholders here.

obfs4 <IP>:<PORT> <key> <etc>

Then login to your mynode instance:

ssh admin@mynode

Open the tor configuration file

sudo vim /etc/tor/torrc

And add the following lines

``` UseBridges 1

ClientTransportPlugin obfs3,obfs4 exec /usr/bin/obfs4proxy

Bridge obfs4 <IP>:<PORT> <key> <etc> ```

Then save & exit (':wq' on vim) and restart the tor service

systemctl restart tor

A nice way of seeing if what you did had some effect is to watch the logs. I could not find a tor specific log files, but this did the trick:

sudo tail -f /var/log/syslog | grep tor