What kind of different information can be had/ascertained in the logs with the various entries in logs

Question

I am running Debian Jessie and running TBB 3.6.5. This can be known by running torbrowser-launcher . I am using the torbrowser-launcher as packaged in Debian.

On studying the manual, I came to know that the log by default only shows warnings. Something like :-

Sep 19 01:24:55.000 [warn] Problem bootstrapping. Stuck at 80%: Connecting to the Tor network. (Network is unreachable; NOROUTE; count 519; recommendation warn)

The manual page tells that you could do some more things :-

By default, Tor starts out logging messages at level "notice" and higher to the console. It stops doing so after it parses its configuration, if the configuration tells it to log anywhere else. You can override this behavior with the --hush option, which tells Tor to only send warnings and errors to the console, or with the --quiet option, which tells Tor not to log to the console at all.

Other options can be specified on the command-line in the format "--option value", in the format "option value", or in a configuration file. For instance, you can tell Tor to start listening for SOCKS connections on port 9999 by passing --SOCKSPort 9999 or SOCKSPort 9999 to it on the command line, or by putting "SOCKSPort 9999" in the configuration file. You will need to quote options with spaces in them: if you want Tor to log all debugging messages to debug.log, you will probably need to say --Log debug file debug.log.

Now the first thing seems to be that Tor is not documented on the CLI itself. It took me quite sometime to understand where the Tor browser is in my system and aliased it to make it more accessible.

$ alias tor
alias tor='/home/shirish/.local/share/torbrowser/tbb/x86_64/tor-browser_en-US/start-tor-browser'

I also tried to see if there were any --help triggers but found it wanting :-

$ ./start-tor-browser --help
usage: ./start-tor-browser [--debug]

So can somebody share with me some examples of the different types of entries in the log, for example if I use WARN/DEBUG/INFO/TRACE. I also don't know if all the different characteristics are allowed or only one of them.

Another query, do I need to have multiple logs or a single log can have all the different characteristics I want to know and understand.

Looking forward to knowing more. As of right now, my objective is to first get the logs happening which is not happening, see the follow-up question, only then can I come back to this.

Follow-up question :- Follow-up question: Why my log is not showing tor_notices.log and tor_traces.log?

Answer 1

The different levels are as follows (Tor Docs)

ERROR critical issue occurred, the user needs to be notified

WARN non-critical issue occurred that the user should be aware of

NOTICE information that is helpful to the user

INFO high level library activity

DEBUG low level library activity

TRACE request/reply logging

Warn means that an issue occurred such as not being able to make a circuit. A notice is just information that user might find useful such as bootstrapping being complete.

These are by no means the only warnings or notices.