ExitNodes not making any circuits

Question

I'm running Linux Mint 19.1 and I apt-get installed tor and it is running fine. However if I add the line

ExitNodes {us}

to /etc/tor/torrc and restart the tor service, the service starts successfully but tor doesn't work, by which I mean the socks proxy on port 9050 no longer has an internet connection.

To try to diagnose the problem, I added the following line

ControlPort 9051

to /etc/tor/torrc and ran this script.

With the ExitNodes line absent I get the expected output with 4 different circuits shown. With the ExitNodes line present I get no output at all.

I have tried different country codes and verified that exit nodes exist in those countries by looking at this list but nothing seems to work.

I have tried adding the StrictNodes 1 option as well without any difference.

Does anyone have any ideas how I can force an exit node from a specific country, or how to further diagnose this problem?

Answer 1

I uncommented the following line

Log debug file /var/log/tor/debug.log

in /etc/tor/torrc and restarted the tor service.

I then read the following 268 lines in to the debug.log file:

[warn] Failed to open GEOIP file /usr/share/tor/geoip.  We've been configured to use (or avoid) nodes in certain countries, and we need GEOIP information to figure out which ones they are. Do you have the tor-geoipdb package installed?

After running sudo apt install tor-geoipdb it worked fine.