I'd really appreciate some clueful suggestions or help please - thank you. I'm not new to Tor; I have an existing relay I run, https://atlas.torproject.org/#details/ECC3599DDCFE44C3F28AE0C9DC5DE92847D360... , but I am unable to get a new Tor relay up and running on an entirely different VPS.
I am running on Ubuntu 16.04 Server on a VPS on https://box.cock.li/ . On first attempt I couldn't get a Tor relay running, so I started again from scratch, getting the VPS administrator to reprovision the VPS from scratch, to no avail.
I SSHed in as root, created a user and made it a sudoer, added public key etc. and disabled root admin. Then I SSHed in as the user, installed ntp and ufw, added ports 80 and 443 to ufw, added the Tor respository and key as per https://www.torproject.org/docs/debian.html.en#ubuntu. I installed tor, deb.torproject.org-keyring and arm, and edited torrc such that it reads:
SOCKSPort 0 RunAsDaemon 1 ORPort 443 Nickname kingqueencock ContactInfo ROT13 xvatdhrra@ybirf.qvpxvauvfna.hf DirPort 80 # what port to advertise for directory connections DirPortFrontPage /etc/tor/tor-exit-notice.html MyFamily ECC3599DDCFE44C3F28AE0C9DC5DE92847D3602B
then the "alternative Reduced-Reduced ExitPolicy" from https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/doc/ReducedExitPolicy
then sudo service tor restart.
For all I can gather, Tor isn't running. There are no files in /var/tor/log. ps aux | grep tor returns nothing other than the grep command. arm shows the "Welcome to the Tor network!" initial relay configuration screen, as does sudo -u debian-tor arm.
sudo 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 Thu 2017-07-27 19:36:41 UTC; 3s ago Process: 9781 ExecStart=/bin/true (code=exited, status=0/SUCCESS) Main PID: 9781 (code=exited, status=0/SUCCESS) Tasks: 0 (limit: 512) CGroup: /system.slice/tor.service
Jul 27 19:36:41 localhost systemd[1]: Starting Anonymizing overlay network for TCP (multi-instance-master)... Jul 27 19:36:41 localhost systemd[1]: Started Anonymizing overlay network for TCP (multi-instance-master).
root@localhost:/var/log/tor# ls -al total 8 drwxr-s--- 2 debian-tor adm 4096 Jul 27 19:29 . drwxr-xr-x 7 root root 4096 Jul 27 19:29 ..
The odd thing is if I reboot my VPS by sudo shutdown -r now and do ps aux | grep tor there is tor running as a root user.
root 435 0.0 0.5 44760 5716 ? Ss 19:40 0:00 /usr/bin/tor --defaults-torrc /usr/share/tor/tor-service-defaults-torrc -f /etc/tor/torrc --RunAsDaemon 0 --verify-config
I don't know where that has come from, or if it's a problem. I have had a poke around in init.d and systemd but I am not an expert in those. I am beginning to wonder or suspect the Ubuntu installation image on the VPS may not be entirely clean... If I try to run arm as root, the "new relay" configuration wizard appears and when I quit the tor process isn't running.
I'm stuck. Any help very gratefully received.
Cheers
Doug