Your inquiry is probably more appropriate for the tor-talk mailing list or IRC (channel #tor), but I'll answer it instead of directing you there. (Just keep that in mind for the future!) :)
On 2018-06-30 04:22, john doe wrote:
I got as far as finding a way to get it working by starting "Tor Browser\Browser\TorBrowser\Tor\tor.exe" then dirmngr is working through Tor. Strangely, if I click "Tor Browser\Start Tor Browser" it does not work; dirmngr failed at the following step:
$ dirmngr --homedir ~/try --use-tor -vvv --debug-all --server
[snip]
It looks like dirmngr can't connect to tor when tor is started by doing "Tor Browser\Browser\firefox.exe".
Given the above I have some questions:
- Any idea why dirmngr can't connect to Tor when started the usual way?
- What are the difference between starting "tor.exe" and "firefox.exe"?
I haven't directly confirmed what you asked, but my guess is the way that dirmngr has implemented the --use-tor option.
In my experience, dirmngr's tor integration still* isn't very great. I would still be worried about various leaks with it. (I haven't looked into it in depth.)
* I can't actually speak to recent developments; this is just my impression from the past.
Anyway, to the technical part...
A glance through the manual didn't show any option to configure the tor integration beyond --use-tor, so dirmngr probably hardcodes port 9050 as the Socks proxy that it uses.
tor when run (without specific config) will default to SocksPort 9050. That's probably what happens when you run tor.exe directly.
However, Tor Browser launches tor with SocksPort 9150. So this difference probably explains why dirmngr won't work over tor in that case.
(It is possible to change Tor Browser's config to use port 9050 instead, but I personally wouldn't recommend that.)
I hope that helps!
Best, Dave