On Mon, Sep 07, 2015 at 12:11:28AM -0600, Kenneth Freeman wrote:
This may be a naïve question, but I've fired up my 64-bit Debian box now that the nights are cool, and editing the torrc to establish a bridge relay borks the browser. I provide anonymity much more than I use it myself, but is the bridge relay copacetic? Thanks in advance.
Well, it depends what you put in the torrc file. I assume you edited the torrc file that's inside the tor browser directory tree? Perhaps you did something there that it didn't like. Maybe you followed one of the instructions that suggested setting your socksport to 0, which would disable the client part of your Tor?
The simplest approach in my opinion would be to install the Tor deb and configure it to be a bridge: https://www.torproject.org/docs/tor-relay-debian and in step 2, be sure to uncomment the 'bridgerelay 1' line too.
Then use your Tor Browser totally separately from this Tor.
(It's great that you're using Debian -- not because it's the best OS, though some good arguments can be made that it is, but rather because the Linux Tor packages are maintained best for Debian.)
--Roger