Tor Systemctl Service Won't Turn Start

Support Relay Operator
1

I’m trying to start Tor via systemctl but it won’t seem to start up.

$ service tor start
$ service tor status
● tor.service - Anonymizing overlay network for TCP (multi-instance-master)
     Loaded: loaded (/lib/systemd/system/tor.service; enabled; vendor preset: enabled)
     Active: active (exited) since Wed 2021-12-01 19:33:10 UTC; 1 weeks 1 days ago
   Main PID: 3998861 (code=exited, status=0/SUCCESS)
      Tasks: 0 (limit: 9271)
     Memory: 0B
     CGroup: /system.slice/tor.service

Dec 01 19:33:10 elite systemd[1]: Starting Anonymizing overlay network for TCP (multi-instance-master)...
Dec 01 19:33:10 elite systemd[1]: Finished Anonymizing overlay network for TCP (multi-instance-master).
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What could be going wrong here? Is there something wrong with my config? Where could I get the logs for this? (I have logging set to “debug” but /var/log/tor is empty.

/var/log/tor$ tree
.

0 directories, 0 files
2

Try /etc/init.d/tor start

3

I’m still getting a connection refused on the orport.

4

what does your /var/log/tor/notices.log say?

5

The systemd service tor does not represent an actual Tor instance (hence multi-instance-master). If you did not use the tor-instance-create script, try systemctl status tor@default. For all the logs, try journalctl -u tor@default.

6

it sounds like the tor service doesn’t want to start because something else is using that orport?

Do you have orport enabled or set to auto in your /etc/tor/torrc?

Please ensure that no tor processes are running with “htop”, “top”, or “ps aux | grep tor”

If there are no other tor processes and thats what you read when tor starts then it may be the orport you are picking is used up by another process.

7

I’m getting this error:

Dec 10 13:52:18 elite tor[2383159]: Dec 10 13:52:18.391 [notice] Tor 0.4.5.6 running on Linux with Libevent 2.1.12-stable, OpenSSL 1.1.1j, Zlib 1.2>
Dec 10 13:52:18 elite tor[2383159]: Dec 10 13:52:18.391 [notice] Tor can't help you if you use it wrong! Learn how to be safe at https://www.torpro>
Dec 10 13:52:18 elite tor[2383159]: Dec 10 13:52:18.391 [notice] Read configuration file "/usr/share/tor/tor-service-defaults-torrc".
Dec 10 13:52:18 elite tor[2383159]: Dec 10 13:52:18.391 [notice] Read configuration file "/etc/tor/torrc".
Dec 10 13:52:18 elite tor[2383159]: Dec 10 13:52:18.394 [notice] Based on detected system memory, MaxMemInQueues is set to 5821 MB. You can overrid>
Dec 10 13:52:18 elite tor[2383159]: Dec 10 13:52:18.394 [warn] Tor is currently configured as a relay and a hidden service. That's not very secure:>
Dec 10 13:52:18 elite tor[2383159]: Dec 10 13:52:18.394 [notice] By default, Tor does not run as an exit relay. If you want to be an exit relay, se>
Dec 10 13:52:18 elite tor[2383159]: Dec 10 13:52:18.395 [warn] /var/lib/tor/contact/ is not owned by this user (debian-tor, 114) but by root (0). P>
Dec 10 13:52:18 elite tor[2383159]: Dec 10 13:52:18.395 [warn] Failed to parse/validate config: Failed to configure rendezvous options. See logs fo>
Dec 10 13:52:18 elite tor[2383159]: Dec 10 13:52:18.395 [err] Reading config failed--see warnings above.
Dec 10 13:52:18 elite systemd[1]: tor@default.service: Control process exited, code=exited, status=1/FAILURE
Dec 10 13:52:18 elite systemd[1]: tor@default.service: Failed with result 'exit-code'.
Dec 10 13:52:18 elite systemd[1]: Failed to start Anonymizing overlay network for TCP.
8

sudo chown -R debian-tor:debian-tor /var/lib/tor/contact/

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