Hi all! I'm a fairly new relay operator and I have a few questions regarding some of the nitty-gritty setup on Debian. I've set it up a couple times before, but I can't seem to be able to run my relay as non-root.

Every time I boot up Nyx without using sudo, it says We were unable to read tor's authentication cookie...

Path: /run/tor/control.authcookie   Issue: Authentication failed: unable to read '/run/tor/control.authcookie' ([Errno 13] Permission denied: '/run/tor/control.authcookie')

It works fine when I run it as sudo, but according to its output, it "isn't a good idea, nor should it be necessary." So my first question is: How do I go about getting Nyx to connect to Tor's control socket as a standard, non-sudo process?

My second question revolves around running the Tor daemon as a service. It seems as if, again, I need to run it as root to make it work, otherwise it gives me permission denied errors. What I want is to be able to run 2 consecutive nodes on different accounts; that way I can be more safe and secure while running my relay. If that's able to happen, how would I go about configuring my relay daemons to be separate, i.e. where would I put my torrc? Any help would be much appreciated. Thanks!

Thomas