Tor not starting

Question

Tor had been working fine for a while, but I modified the torrc file and tried to restart and now it will not start again. I removed the edit but now it still will not start. Terminal Output:

[root@EU1 ~]# /etc/init.d/tor status
tor is not running
[root@EU1 ~]# /etc/init.d/tor start
Raising maximum number of filedescriptors (ulimit -n) to 16384.
Starting tor:                                              [  OK  ]
[root@EU1 ~]# /etc/init.d/tor status
tor is not running
[root@EU1 ~]#

Other Terminal Output:

[root@EU1 ~]# tor --service start
Feb 07 08:52:50.002 [notice] Tor v0.2.5.10 (git-42b42605f8d8eac2) running on Linux with Libevent 1.4.13-stable, OpenSSL 1.0.1e-fips and Zlib 1.2.3.
Feb 07 08:52:50.002 [notice] Tor can't help you if you use it wrong! Learn how to be safe at https://www.torproject.org/download/download#warning
Feb 07 08:52:50.002 [notice] Read configuration file "/etc/tor/torrc".
Feb 07 08:52:50.004 [warn] Failed to parse/validate config: Unknown option 'service'.  Failing.
Feb 07 08:52:50.004 [err] Reading config failed--see warnings above.
[root@EU1 ~]#

Contents of my torrc file:

HiddenServiceDir /home/tor/www/.config/1
HiddenServicePort 80 127.0.0.1:3036

Any ideas why this could be?

score 4 · Answer 1 · edited Feb 12 '15 at 15:52

You're starting it wrong. You perhaps want service tor start, depending on your OS.

What you're doing here is running Tor, as root, with commandline arguments of --service start. Tor has never heard of the --service option, so it says so and closes.

(That said, my guess is that your underlying problem is that your Tor daemon doesn't have permission to write to /home/tor/. Your Tor logs should say something like this, but Tor might be exiting before it gets around to writing out that log line.)

Tor not starting

1 Answers1