I'm trying to set up a Tor relay on Debian Jessie. I edited the torrc file and set RunAsDaemon 1. When I try to start tor with sudo tor it returns this:
[warn] /var/lib/tor is not owned by this user (root, 0) but by debian-tor (110). Perhaps you are running Tor as the wrong user?
[warn] Failed to parse/validate config: Couldn't access/create private data directory "/var/lib/tor"
[err] Reading config failed--see warnings above.
How can I fix it?
The first line of the warn message has some hints. The directory /var/lib/tor is owned by the user debian-tor. You executed sudo tor which means that the Tor process is run by the root user. This leads to the error message.
You can either execute the command as debian-tor user:
sudo -u debian-tor tor
or start the process via systemd (or similar means):
sudo systemctl start tor
sudo service tor start
sudo -u debian-tor tor won't provide the same functionality because it doesn't load up the torrc-defaults file to set some default settings, however it will use the settings from /etc/tor/torrc
Commented
May 30, 2017 at 22:37
serviceinterface, running it directly from the command line withsudo torwill cause problems like those you saw, alsoRunAsDaemon 1isn't required but it's overridden by the launched service anyway (if you did enforce runasdaemon it would break the tor service) but you probably want to kill the instance oftorthat's running as root:sudo kill 5184torrunning as root, which may have interfered with thetorservice, if it's not there anymore then this should be resolved.