Hi all,

I've got an issue that I'm seeking help with. I'm with a small group out of RIT that's trying to construct a private TOR network for research purposes, but we've hit a bit of a snag.

I've worked with both liu fengyun's (http://liufengyun.chaos-lab.com/prog/2015/01/09/private-tor-network.html) and Ritter's write up (https://ritter.vg/blog-run_your_own_tor_network.html), but when trying to set up authority directories the whole thing really falls apart.


Trying to edit the torrc file gives errors where it doesn't attempt to bind to the correct ports and trying to set --dirserver or --datadirectory results in errors that there isn't permission to access /var/lib/tor regardless of the owner of the directory (we've tried leaving it as being owned by _tor, tried changing ownership to root, etc) so we can't get the authority directories off the ground.

I'd really appreciate any thoughts

Nicholas R. Parker
Rochester Institute of Technology
5thYear, BS/MS Computing Security