[tor-relays] Help configuring a relay on OS X

[teor]

> On 1 Oct 2016, at 06:06, Surf Norway <surfnorway at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> A few years ago I tried setting up a relay as a way to contribute back to the community, I have fast symmetrical fiber and a Mac mini running as a light file server. I never was able to get it to work and gave up.
> 
> I recently bumped up the RAM to max and put an SSD drive in, upgraded to 10.11 and thought I'd give another go at setting up a relay.

You'll need around 512 MB - 768 MB of RAM for the tor process.

> I've installed Xcode and the command line tools, installed MacPorts and used that to install Tor.

Using these instructions?
https://www.torproject.org/docs/tor-doc-osx.html.en

> I configured the torrc file as best I could and expect that's probably the problem with my setup. When I start Tor (v0.2.8.8) it identifies the OS, reads the torrc file and grabs a chunk of memory for MaxMemInQueues.

Can you provide your torrc file?
Please feel free to leave out specific IP addresses if you would like - but
your IP address will become public when your relay gets on the network.

> Then it opens OR listener but on an invalid IP (0.0.0.0),

0.0.0.0 means "bind to all interfaces" - it's an entirely valid IP address
for this purpose.

> complains that it can't write to the log file (permission denied),

Can you please copy and paste all the log messages, rather than describing
them? The specific details are often important.

> and closes partially-constructed OR & directory options.
> 
> Before I go and change the log file permissions, what user should I be running as when I start Tor as a relay?

On OS X, create a new system user called "tor", and run tor as that user.
This isolates tor from the other processes running on that machine.
(We recommend )

> Ideally I want it to start with the system and run by default in the background and uncommented "RunAsDaemon 1" in the torrc file. The mini sits and serves files normally and isn't usually in use as a normal computer/console. When I run Tor myself it's from a different machine in order to use the Tor browser. All I want the mini to do is act as a relay, nothing more.

Here's how you can start a relay on OS X on boot:
https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/doc/MacRunOnBoot

T

--
Tim Wilson-Brown (teor)

teor2345 at gmail dot com
PGP C855 6CED 5D90 A0C5 29F6 4D43 450C BA7F 968F 094B
ricochet:ekmygaiu4rzgsk6n
xmpp: teor at torproject dot org







-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 842 bytes
Desc: Message signed with OpenPGP using GPGMail
URL: <http://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-relays/attachments/20161001/21cdc314/attachment-0001.sig>