How cna I make a request through the Tor daemon originate from a US IP?

Question

I”m using Tor 0.2.8.9 on Mac Sierra. I’m having trouble reaching a site using my Tor daemon, which I start like so

tor --CookieAuthentication 0 --HashedControlPassword "" --ControlPort 9050 --SocksPort 50003

The only changes I’ve made to the /opt/local/etc/tor/torrc, default configuration are

MaxCircuitDirtiness 60
ExitNodes {us} 
StrictNodes 1

but when I attempt to access a particularly problematic site, which I can reach fine in a Firefox or Chrome browser, I get this error …

localhost:tmp davea$ curl --socks5-hostname localhost:50003 http://www.domain.com/results02/ches1116.htm
curl: (7) Can't complete SOCKS5 connection to 0.0.0.0:0. (1)

Replace “domain” with “hitekracing” to see what I’m talking about. Are there any other configuration changes I can make to make my request through my Tor daemon behave more like a normal browser request coming from the US?

Answer 1

You're trying to use a specific country code with no GeoIP database.

Since IPs don't actually have any relationship to countries at all you need a database of made up links between IP address and country to fool Tor into believing the same lie.

Specifically you need to define a GeoIPFile and a GeoIPv6File.

These files are the old format of GeoIP database distributed by maxmind, the geoip files distributed with Tor Browser and Tor explain how to generate them from a terse statement in a comment at the top of the file, e.g.:

wget https://geolite.maxmind.com/download/geoip/database/GeoLite2-Country.mmdb.gz
gunzip GeoLite2-Country.mmdb.gz
python mmdb-convert.py GeoLite2-Country.mmdb

Using a tool like mmdb-convert to convert them.

Once you've obtained one of these files, you specify a path to it for the GeoIP{,v6}File option in your tor configuration.