I want to setup an onion service on a VPS. For this I installed a fresh
Centos6 copy, replaced Apache by Nginx, got TOR from Epel repo.
As long that I simply run Tor, all is right. But when I modify the
tor.rc to setup an onion service, problems begin.
In tor.rc I unchecked the lines
HiddenServiceDir /var/lib/tor/hidden_service/
HiddenServicePort 80 127.0.0.1:80
Then:
# service tor restart
Checking if tor configuration is validMay 15 19:01:11.001 [notice] Tor
0.2.9.17 (git-e057a19b74589fca) running on Linux with Libevent
2.0.21-stable, OpenSSL 1.0.1e-fips and Zlib 1.2.3.
May 15 19:01:11.001 [notice] Tor can't help you if you use it wrong!
Learn how to be safe at
https://www.torproject.org/download/download#warning
May 15 19:01:11.002 [notice] Read configuration file "/etc/tor/torrc".
May 15 19:01:11.006 [warn] Couldn't find $HOME environment variable
while expanding "~/.tor"; defaulting to "".
May 15 19:01:11.006 [warn] Default DataDirectory is "~/.tor". This
expands to "/.tor", which is probably not what you want. Using
"/var/tor" instead
May 15 19:01:11.007 [warn] Directory /var/lib/tor/hidden_service/ cannot
be read: Permission denied
May 15 19:01:11.007 [warn] Checking service directory
/var/lib/tor/hidden_service/ failed.
May 15 19:01:11.007 [warn] Failed to parse/validate config: Failed to
configure rendezvous options. See logs for details.
May 15 19:01:11.007 [err] Reading config failed--see warnings above.
To solve the $HOME point I uncommented the line
#DataDirectory /var/lib/tor
But so, remains the problem of
May 15 19:01:11.007 [warn] Directory /var/lib/tor/hidden_service/ cannot
be read: Permission denied
May 15 19:01:11.007 [warn] Checking service directory
/var/lib/tor/hidden_service/ failed.
May 15 19:01:11.007 [warn] Failed to parse/validate config: Failed to
configure rendezvous options. See logs for details.
I looked online and found a few "solutions", none of them work (changing
ownership and permissions of the /var/lib/tor/*, setting a completely
different directory in /var/, etc etc)
Any help would be welcome, thank you!