Tor Stuck on "disconnected"

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1

Description of the issue:
I’m on Kubuntu, brave version “Version 1.77.97 Chromium: 135.0.7049.84 (Official Build) (64-bit)” installed from Snap.
And when i open a private tor window, is stuck at “disconnecting”. I’m sure it worked fine a week or two ago.

I’ve seen the issue in these forums dozens of times, and as such i have done almost every troubleshooting step mentioned in them:

  • Toggled Tor off and on
  • checked if Tor browser works (yes)
  • Toggled “block scripts” but it made no difference whether its on or off
  • I can access https://torproject.org from Brave.
  • checked brave://components/ and everything is up to date
  • Reverted to a previous version (1.77.95) and back, tor was not working on either version
  • checked brave://tor-internals/ with the output:

General Info tab

Tor version:
Tor process ID: -1
Tor Proxy URI:
Tor connection status: Disconnected
Tor initialization progress:

Logs
blank

Tor Control Events
blank

The things i have not tried yet:

  • reinstalling the entire browser (i really don’t want to have to backup and restore everything)
  • some people reported waiting for a long time (5-30 minutes) in other threads and the problems sometimes resolves on its own. i had my tor window open while writing this, and if that works, i have not waited enough.

The thread i’m most hopeful about is:
https://community.brave.com/t/private-window-with-tor-always-shows-as-disconnected-tor-browser-works-fine/513598/2
It does mention something about cloudflare treating tor.bravesoftware.com as malicious, but frankly, most of the tread went over my head.
I’m not sure if this information helps at all, but my situation seems to be indentical? And in that thread (and many others on the topic of TOR in brave) the situation resolved seemingly on its own.

I’m sorry for making another thread about tor not working, but apart from the one i linked, everyone gets locked before finding a concrete solution, and the problem seems to be happening to few people on and off for a few years, and maybe some more clear solution was found in the meantime.

2

@Sigmul

In a Brave Browser New Window, go to: brave://local-state/ and search for:

  • tor_used
  • TorEverUsed
  • tor_disabled

In a Brave Browser New Window, go to: brave://prefs-internals/ and search for:

  • alternate_private_search_engine_in_tor

Results?

3

Thanks for replying, here are the results

  "tor_used": {
    "metadata": [ "user_controlled", "user_modifiable", "extension_modifiable" ],
   "value": true

“Brave.Core.TorEverUsed”: {
“sent”: true,
“timestamp”: 1707846382.392545,
“value”: “0”

“tor_disabled”: {
“metadata”: [ “user_controlled”, “user_modifiable”, “extension_modifiable” ],
“value”: false

There’s no hits for " * alternate_private_search_engine_in_tor" in brave://prefs-internals/

From what i’ve seen, issues similar (sometimes identical to mine) are either locked after no replies or the solution is “it randomly started working again”.

4

I wonder whether the snap sandbox is interfering with the tor daemon in this case.

Are you able to test with the native Ubuntu packages from https://brave.com/linux/?

2 Likes
5

Thanks for the idea, i’ll test it tomorrow.
I don’t think it’s snap’s fault, because it literally worked just fine a week or two ago, so if snap was the cause, it wouldn’t have broken just now.

6

Ah, that’s probably not it then.

Once you have the native package installed though, try starting the browser on the command line to see if there are any relevant error messages printed on the terminal when you open a Tor window:

brave-browser-stable --enable-logging=stderr
7

Umm…you are going to love this…remember how i said

well, i sat down, turning brave on with the to check this thread ,saw your suggestion and was about to restart brave with the --enable-logging, but i tried turning tor on…and tor connected normally, like it did few weeks ago.

I’m sure i haven’t changed anything in the meantime, and did nothing outside of brave that should have changed anything, yet it works now. I guess I’ll mark it as solved now?

Since it’s working, I can’t really gather any useful logs to help to resolve this issue for anyone else in the future, since i can’t replicate the issue.

If anyone in the future with the same issue stumbles upon this thread, I’m sorry?

Thank you for suggesting steps to diagnose this and lets hope it doesn’t happen again to anyone else.