Running Tor as Super User

Support Relay Operator
1

I run my Tor bridge service obviously in sudo mode. I don’t know why. Maybe I took a wrong exit somewhere during the installation months ago. Anyway, to run commands for checking the status of the service I have to do with sudo. Otherwise it complains for unsufficient permissions.

Should I let run the service in that high level mode furthermore, or should I downgrade the service to the rank of a normal user.

If the latter, how?

2

assuming a debian’ish Tor installation - the service will drop is privileges after getting the privileged port (443) and is running as user “debian-tor” - check ps aux|grep tor

because debian-tor does not have a shell/login (see /etc/passwd → “/bin/false”) you have to interact with the service as root/with sudo but itself is not running as root

2 Likes