[tor-bugs] #4586 [Tor Cloud]: Include Arm in Tor Cloud image

Tor Bug Tracker & Wiki torproject-admin at torproject.org
Mon Nov 28 21:05:15 UTC 2011


#4586: Include Arm in Tor Cloud image
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 Reporter:  james21      |          Owner:  runa
     Type:  enhancement  |         Status:  new 
 Priority:  normal       |      Milestone:      
Component:  Tor Cloud    |        Version:      
 Keywords:               |         Parent:      
   Points:               |   Actualpoints:      
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Comment(by atagar):

 > The next question is; what does it take to get arm up and running?

 https://gitweb.torproject.org/arm.git/blob/HEAD:/README#l21

 > I remember having some problems running it as non-root

 There's a few things that commonly run into permission gotchas...
 - reading the authentication cookie requires membership in tor's group
 - getting connection data (for instance, from proc or netstat) often
 requires that you're running as the tor user
 - writing to the torrc requires that you... well, have write permissions
 to the torrc

 To deal with these I run arm as the tor user, and for the last I simply
 avoid using the torrc supplied with the deb.

 Iirc the trouble that you were running into was that tor's deb configures
 the torrc to only have write permissions from root because they only want
 it hand edited (personally I think that's dumb, but oh well). A hack was
 added to allow an alternative torrc for vidalia, but that was later deemed
 to be a mistake so the same hack doesn't exist for arm. As you discovered
 back then this means that SAVECONF fails unless you're running tor as
 root, and arm can't write directly unless it's running as root.

 This said, arm can monitor and configure the tor process just fine - it
 just can't save those configuration changes. Also, Jake spent quite a
 while coming up with a setuid workaround which is available with arm's
 most recent version, though not enabled by default.

 I wouldn't recommend using the Ubuntu archives unless you can't avoid it.
 Ubuntu's policy leads to a lot of stale software and arm is no exception -
 the copy in the Lucid repo is 1.4.0 which is around a year out of date.

 Cheers! -Damian

-- 
Ticket URL: <https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/4586#comment:4>
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