[tor-relays] Relay in a stop/start loop

[Roger Dingledine]

On Mon, Apr 06, 2020 at 11:01:09AM +0200, Totor be wrote:
> I have upgraded recently my relays (totorbe*) to CentOS8 + tor 0.4.2.7 and
> they all seemed to run properly
> This morning, I just noticed a weird behavior on one of them (no idea since
> when this is going on)
> 
> When starting tor, it goes to the point of IP identification and then
> starts shutting down ("Interrupt: we have stopped accepting new
> connections...")
> It attempts then to restart immediately and loops start --> interrupt -->
> start etc...
> 
> Any idea where too start investigating??

Hm!

It sounds like whatever package you have auto-starts Tor if it notices
that it's not running. That's not unreasonable, but also it ought to have
some error count where it only tries to restart it a certain number of
times per timeframe. This is something that either the package's init
script should do, or that systemd's settings should handle.

The bigger mystery for you is: why does Tor keep deciding to exit? It
looks like something is sending it the equivalent of a ^C. What is doing
that? This is the main thing to investigate.

Maybe you are running some external tool like nyx, or your own script
based on stem, which is killing it somehow?

Maybe systemd is somehow deciding that after some timeout it needs to
die? I find it interesting that you get these two lines right after each
other each time:

Apr 06 10:35:13.000 [notice] Signaled readiness to systemd
Apr 06 10:35:13.000 [notice] Interrupt

It's as though systemd is misinterpreting the signal from Tor, and
deciding to kill it rather than be happy.

So: I suspect "bug in centos package" as a good place to investigate.
Maybe there is already a ticket open in your packaging system?

Be sure also to check other more general issues like "do you have enough
disk space?"

--Roger