Johnny Chi

It’s just that i wanna learn more about computers. At the time with Windows I didn’t think i could really understand what is going on behind the scene. It hides too much stuff from the users and there was a weird idea in my head that the advanced use of computers is supposed to be in the command line, Windows just doesn’t seem to be the right choice. I don’t play much games or even heavily use computers in general, so my laptop basically became a big toy for me to tinker with.

You don’t wanna use rolling release distros trust me, the whole point of server is automation and less maintenance. I got couple personal servers running, after things i need got setup and all of them running at a decent capacity, i just turn them on and never worry about them. Old package and software doesn’t necessarily mean less security, quite opposite actually, i suggest you take a look at how stable distros distribute their software, such as Debian. For a Debian package becomes stable, it has to go through several stages, experimental, unstable, testing, and finally stable, that’s why their packages are old, and because they are old, they are secure. It might be quite opposite than what you expect.

Mostly i use Debian for my personal servers, some of them are stable and some of them are testing, because of Podman’s new feature Quadlet. Honestly many features of Debian feel really old, like APT’s source list, preferences, and the way to deal with unattended upgrades. It’s kinda hard to get it at first and it’s easy to shoot yourself in the foot, especially many people tend to unintentionally mix and match packages from different suites for new software. But once you get comfortable with it things just work.

As my experience, no matter what distros i use, the worst distros are always those that i don’t understand and in a hurry to put them into production. Just pick one popular server distro and learn the ecosystem, you will find out what distros you like really soon.

I don’t use tor that often but as my understanding tor is basically a socks5 proxy, which operates at application layer, so there is no way you can route all your traffic through tor, at least not the ICMP packets.

Some applications are willing to use your proxy settings like http_proxy and https_proxy environment variables, but some of them not, especially for udp based applications (most games). The workaround that i am aware of is to use a rule-based proxy program that supports TUN mode, such as Clash Meta (the link is a fork of clash meta called mihomo, which is the one that i am currently using). Basically it creates a virtual interface and traps all the higher layer traffic into this interface, so it can route them through the configured proxy (tor in your case), even for applications that don’t honor your proxy settings at all.

In Clash Meta you can use configurations such as this to route all your layer 5 and 4 traffic through tor, the important part is to enable the tun mode. After that you can simply use command mihomo -f config.yaml to start it.

port: 7890
socks-port: 7891
redir-port: 7892
mode: rule
tun:
  enable: true
  stack: gvisor
  auto-route: true
  auto-redirect: true
  auto-detect-interface: true
proxies:
  -
    name: 'tor'
    type: socks5
    server: localhost
    port: 9050
proxy-groups:
  -
    name: DEFAULT
    type: select
    proxies:
      - 'tor'
rules:
  - MATCH,DEFAULT