Privoxy Frequently Asked Questions
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# 5. Troubleshooting

### 5.1. I just upgraded and am getting "connection refused" with every web page?

Either Privoxy is not running, or your browser is configured for a different port than what Privoxy is using.

The old Privoxy (and also Junkbuster) used port 8000 by default. This has been changed to port 8118 now, due to a conflict with NAS (Network Audio Service), which uses port 8000. If you haven't, you need to change your browser to the new port number, or alternately change the listen-address option in Privoxy's main configuration file.

### 5.2. I just added a new rule, but the steenkin ad is still getting through. How?

If the ad had been displayed before you added its URL, it will probably be held in the browser's cache for some time, so it will be displayed without the need for any request to the server, and Privoxy will not be in the picture. The best thing to do is try flushing the browser's caches. And then try again.

If this doesn't help, you probably have an error in the rule you applied. Try pasting the full URL of the offending ad into http://config.privoxy.org/show-url-info and see if it really matches your new rule.

### 5.3. One of my favorite sites does not work with Privoxy. What can I do?

First verify that it is indeed a Privoxy problem, by toggling off Privoxy through http://config.privoxy.org/toggle, and then shift-reloading the problem page (i.e. holding down the shift key while clicking reload. Alternatively, flush your browser's disk and memory caches).

If still a problem, go to http://config.privoxy.org/show-url-info and paste the full URL of the page in question into the prompt. See which actions are being applied to the URL, and which matches in which actions files are responsible for that. Now, armed with this information, go to http://config.privoxy.org/show-status and select the appropriate actions files for editing.

You can now either look for a section which disables the actions that you suspect to cause the problem and add a pattern for your site there, or make up a completely new section for your site. In any case, the recommended way is to disable only the prime suspect, reload the problem page, and only if the problem persists, disable more and more actions until you have identified the culprit. You may or may not want to turn the other actions on again. Remember to flush your browser's caches in between any such changes!

Alternately, if you are comfortable with a text editor, you can accomplish the same thing by editing the appropriate actions file. Probably the easiest way to deal with such problems when editing by hand is to add your site to a { fragile } section in `user.action`, which is an alias that turns off most "dangerous" actions, but is also likely to turn off more actions then needed, and thus lower your privacy and protection more than necessary,

Troubleshooting actions is discussed in more detail in the user-manual appendix. There is also an actions tutorial.

### 5.4. After installing Privoxy, I have to log in every time I start IE. What gives?

This is a quirk that effects the installation of Privoxy, in conjunction with Internet Explorer and Internet Connection Sharing on Windows 2000 and Windows XP. The symptoms may appear to be corrupted or invalid DUN settings, or passwords.

When setting up an NT based Windows system with Privoxy you may find that things do not seem to be doing what you expect. When you set your system up you will probably have set up Internet Connection Sharing (ICS) with Dial up Networking (DUN) when logged in with administrator privileges. You will probably have made this DUN connection available to other accounts that you may have set-up on your system. E.g. Mum or Dad sets up the system and makes accounts suitably configured for the kids.

When setting up Privoxy in this environment you will have to alter the proxy set-up of Internet Explorer (IE) for the specific DUN connection on which you wish to use Privoxy. When you do this the ICS DUN set-up becomes user specific. In this instance you will see no difference if you change the DUN connection under the account used to set-up the connection. However when you do this from another user you will notice that the DUN connection changes to make available to "Me only". You will also find that you have to store the password under each different user!

The reason for this is that each user's set-up for IE is user specific. Each set-up DUN connection and each LAN connection in IE store the settings for each user individually. As such this enforces individual configurations rather than common ones. Hence the first time you use a DUN connection after re-booting your system it may not perform as you expect, and prompt you for the password. Just set and save the password again and all should be OK.

[Thanks to Ray Griffith for this submission.]

### 5.5. I cannot connect to any FTP sites. Privoxy seems to be blocking me.

Privoxy cannot act as a proxy for FTP traffic, so do not configure your browser to use Privoxy as an FTP proxy. The same is true for any protocol other than HTTP or HTTPS.

Most browsers understand FTP as well as HTTP. If you connect to a site, with a URL like ftp://ftp.example.com, your browser is making an FTP connection, and not a HTTP connection. So while your browser may speak FTP, Privoxy does not, and cannot proxy such traffic.

To complicate matters, some systems may have a generic "proxy" setting, which will silently enable both HTTP and FTP proxying! So it is possible to accidentally enable FTP proxying in these cases. And of course, if this happens, Privoxy will indeed cause problems since it does not know FTP.

Will Privoxy ever proxy FTP traffic? Unlikely. There just is not much reason, and the work to make this happen is more than it may seem.

### 5.6. In Mac OSX, I can't configure Microsoft Internet Explorer to use Privoxy as the HTTP proxy.

Microsoft Internet Explorer (in versions like 5.1) respects system-wide network settings. In order to change the HTTP proxy, open System Preferences, and click on the Network icon. In the settings pane that comes up, click on the Proxies tab. Ensure the "Web Proxy (HTTP)" checkbox is checked and enter 127.0.0.1 in the entry field. Enter 8118 in the Port field. The next time you start IE, it should reflect these values.

### 5.7. In Mac OSX, I dragged the Privoxy folder to the trash in order to uninstall it. Now the finder tells me I don't have sufficient privileges to empty the trash.

Just dragging the Privoxy folder to the trash is not enough to delete it. Privoxy supplies an uninstall.command file that takes care of these details. Open the trash, drag the uninstall.command file out of the trash and double-click on it. You will be prompted for confirmation and the administration password.

The trash may still appear full after this command; emptying the trash from the desktop should make it appear empty again.

### 5.8. In Mac OSX Panther (10.3), images often fail to load and/or I experience random delays in page loading. I'm using localhost as my browser's proxy setting.

We believe this is due to an IPv6-related bug in OSX, but don't fully understand the issue yet. In any case, changing the proxy setting to 127.0.0.1 instead of localhost works around the problem.

### 5.9. I get a completely blank page at one site. "View Source" shows only: <html><body></body></html>. Without Privoxy the page loads fine.

Chances are that the site suffers from a bug in PHP, which results in empty pages being sent if the client explicitly requests an uncompressed page, like Privoxy does. This bug has been fixed in PHP 4.2.3.

To find out if this is in fact the source of the problem, try adding the site to a -prevent-compression section in `user.action`:

       # Make exceptions for ill-behaved sites:
       #
       {-prevent-compression}
        .example.com

If that works, you may also want to report the problem to the site's webmasters, telling them to use zlib.output_compression instead of ob_gzhandler in their PHP applications (workaround) or upgrade to PHP 4.2.3 or later (fix).

### 5.10. Why am I getting a 503 Error (WSAECONNREFUSED) on every page?

More than likely this is a problem with the network stack. ZoneAlarm has been reported to cause this symptom -- even if not running. The solution is to either fight the ZA configuration, or uninstall ZoneAlarm, and then find something better behaved in its place. Other firewall type products may cause similar type problems if not configured correctly.

### 5.11. My logs show many "Unable to get my own hostname" lines. Why?

Privoxy tries to get the hostname of the system its running on from the IP address of the system interface it is bound to (from the `config` file listen-address setting). If the system cannot supply this information, Privoxy logs this condition.

Typically, this would be considered a system configuration error. It is not a fatal error to Privoxy however, but may result in a much slower response from Privoxy due to DNS timeouts.

### 5.12. When I try to launch Privoxy, I get an error message "port 8118 is already in use" (or similar wording). Why?

Port 8118 is Privoxy's default TCP "listening" port. Typically this message would mean that there is already one instance of Privoxy running, and you are actually trying to start a second Privoxy on the same port, which will not work. How and why this might happen varies from platform to platform, but you need to check your installation and start-up procedures.

### 5.13. Pages with UTF-8 fonts are garbled.

This is caused by the "demoronizer" filter, which was introduced in version 3.0.2, and was inappropriately turned on by default. You should either upgrade Privoxy, or at least upgrade to the most recent `default.action` file available from SourceForge. Or you can simply disable the demoronizer filter.

### 5.14. Why are binary files (such as images) corrupted when Privoxy is used?

This may also be caused by the "demoronizer" filter, in conjunction with a web server that is misreporting a file type. Binary files are exempted from Privoxy's filtering (unless the web server by mistake says the file is a plain text file). Either upgrade Privoxy, or go to the most recent `default.action` file available from SourceForge.

### 5.15. What is the "demoronizer" and why is it there?

The original demoronizer was a Perl script that cleaned up HTML pages which were created with certain Microsoft products. MS has used proprietary extensions to standardized font encodings (ISO 8859-1), which has caused problems for pages that are viewed with non-Microsoft products (and are expecting to see a standard set of fonts). The demoronizer corrected these errors so the pages displayed correctly. Privoxy borrowed from this script, introducing a filter based on the original demoronizer, which in turn could correct these errors on the fly.

But this is only needed in some situations, and will cause serious problems in some other situations.

If you are using Microsoft products, you do not need it. If you need to view pages with UTF-8 characters (such as Cyrillic or Chinese), then it will cause corruption of the fonts, and thus should not be on.

On the other hand, if you use non-Microsoft products, and you occasionally notice wierd characters on pages, you might want to try it.

This filter was introduced with version 3.0.2 of Privoxy, and was on by default in that version. It is off in all subsequent versions (unless turned on by the user).

### 5.16. Why do I keep seeing "PrivoxyWindowOpen()" in raw source code?

Privoxy is attempting to disable malicious Javascript in this case, with the unsolicited-popups filter. Privoxy cannot tell very well "good" code snippets from "bad" code snippets.

If you see this in HTML source, and the page displays without problems, then this is good, and likely some pop-up window was disabled. If you see this where it is causing a problem, such as a downloaded program source code file, then you should set an exception for this site or page such that the integrity of the page stays in tact by disabling all filtering.

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