Tor No Longer Starting

[necron]

Anybody have any ideas what I'm doing wrong?

Starting with the minimal config file that comes with the ebuild gives these results:

[toralf]

[necron]

I get the start-stop-daemon error whether or not I'm using a torrc file that generates those messages about parsing. And checkconfig doesn't do anything. Downgrading tor and booting into a different kernel doesn't seem to make a difference either.

[freke]

You could try enable debug-logging in the torrc.

Same version works fine here:

[necron]

Here is the result of the debug messages from issuing 'tor' and '/etc/init.d/tor start' in that order:

[necron]

Here's the debug output with a minimal torrc (without the complaints about parsing the file written to stdout). It still seems to complain about being unable to parse the torrc file, in the debug output.

[freke]

You've tried recreating the torrc-file(s)?
As toralf pointed out this

[ct85711]

One thing you should check and be careful on, is the non-shown characters that may be at the end of the lines (like spaces and tabs and others).
This can also be a factor on the editor you are using to save the file, as it may be be adding (CR and LF at end of the lines or something). I know I tested the default/basic file and tor started up fine, even with the debug statement in it; but I used vim and not some GUI text/word editor.

[necron]

I don't think that I've ever used anything except for Vim to edit config files. Vim is too damned good.

[ct85711]

A couple things to help narrow it down, is to first check the /etc/tor/torrc-defaults file and make sure there isn't anything strange in that file.

The other thing you could do, is when you try running tor, is try running it yourself (instead of starting it's service) and use the -f option and specify the config file.
My thinking on this is that the service is possibly reading a different config file than we are expecting. By manually specifying the config file, we force it to use a specific one.

https://www.torproject.org/docs/tor-manual.html.en
According to tor's manual online, it looks for a config file in the config for the system (i.e. /etc/tor/) and also in the user's home directory.
It also references the torrc-defaults file for option that wasn't set in the config file.

[necron]

The logs seem to indicate that it's reading /etc/tor/torrc. I do not have any /etc/tor/torrc-defaults file though.

[necron]

Sorry to bump an old thread, but the same issue has arisen again with Tor-0.3.5.8. No idea how it got resolved last time (I think that it was solved through an update).

I've checked out the config files in vim (which is the only text editor that I really use) and there are no hidden carriage returns or weird characters lurking in the files that I can find. I've tried starting Tor up with the torrc file that comes with the package, I've tried a minimal config and I've tried running Tor without calling it through rc-service or the init script. Is there maybe some application or library that Tor depends on to parse the config files that's gotten screwed up? There don't seem to be any bug reports that I can find that sound like my issue, so I'm inclined to think that it's just me misconfiguring my system somehow. Using the checkconfig option with the init script returns nothing.

[necron]

Just tried running tor-3.5.8 after deleting /etc/tor/torrc. Same error in spite of the fact that tor is not reading anything that I've edited: