[tor-talk] torsocks, usewithtor, torify questions - end the confusion!

[adrelanos]

jhanse at yandex.com:
> I want to understand the best torification tool to use, but it's really hard to learn about what each tool is and how it is different and who is responsible for which tool.  Various places on torproject.org site talk about torify, usewithtor, torsocks, etc.

Please consider updating those pages (wiki can be edited by everyone)
and submitting trac tickets against the website to fix the mess.

> First, this page says torsocks is installed when tor is installed but this is NOT true, at least not from the yum repository that is run by torproject.org:
>        https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/doc/SupportPrograms

> The only thing I get is torify. Without tsocks or torsocks, torify doesn't even make sense!

Torify and tsocks are outdated. Don't bother with it.

> So I wind up on google code trying to understand about torsocks.
> 
> There is no documentation on the web explaining what/who/when/how usewithtor is different than torsocks.  It's quite confusing.  The only place I found something was the usewithtor manpage. That's nice, but this info should be on the web.

Can/should be added to the wiki.

> However, the manpage for usewithtor says "usewithtor  runs  torsocks(1)  with  the  default  configuration  file, located at /usr/local/etc/torsocks.conf.  Running torsocks(1) directly means that no configuration  file  will  be  used..." If you read the torsocks manpage, it says "If  TORSOCKS_CONF_FILE is not set, torsocks will attempt to read the configuration file at /usr/local/etc/torsocks.conf"
> 
> So which manpage is correct? If the torsocks manpage is correct, then usewithtor serves no purpose because it indicates its only purpose is to run torsocks with that config file, right? So why not make sure torsocks works like its manpage says it does and REMOVE usewithtor? End the confusion please!
> 
> Back to torify which comes with Tor itself, now I have all three wrapper scripts installed. I don't know which to use. I wish there was just one because they all do the same thing from a newb perspective. 
> 
> If torify comes with Tor, is that the most reliable one to use?

No, it's outdated. Only for people who haven't switched.

> On the other hand, Tor does NOT come with torsocks so if you install that you get the other wrappers anyway. HELP!

Just use usewithtor.
And to find out where torsocks.conf is, use whereis torsocks.conf