Warnings in syslog for wrong permissions on hidden service dir are misleading

[throwaway232344]

I had the wrong permissions on my hidden service directory which caused the tor service to fail starting. Logging doesn't work when the permissions are not set properly, so I could only get info from the syslog. I see the following errors:

Dec 24 00:46:28 ArchLaptop tor[7297]: Dec 24 00:46:28.460 [notice] Read configuration file "/etc/tor/torrc".
Dec 24 00:46:28 ArchLaptop tor[7297]: Dec 24 00:46:28.465 [warn] Permissions on directory /home/merito/hidden_service/ are too permissive.
Dec 24 00:46:28 ArchLaptop tor[7297]: Dec 24 00:46:28.465 [warn] Failed to parse/validate config: Failed to configure rendezvous options. See logs for details.
Dec 24 00:46:28 ArchLaptop tor[7297]: Dec 24 00:46:28.465 [err] Reading config failed--see warnings above.
Dec 24 00:46:28 ArchLaptop systemd[1]: tor.service: Main process exited, code=exited, status=1/FAILURE

Maybe the log entry on the permissions for the directory should be of level err? A warning seems to suggest that this is acceptable, so I tried to find an issue in the parsing of the config, thinking there might be some kind of complicated problem with configuring rendezvous options.

[nickm]

It is impossible that we will fix all 226 currently open 028 tickets before 028 releases. Time to move some out. This is my second pass through the "new" and tickets, looking for things to move to 0.2.9.

[nickm]

Create a review-group-2 from (most of the) tickets in 0.2.8 or 0.2.9 or 029-nickm-says-yes listed as needs_review,

[nickm]

Wait, this doesn't belong in needs_review. There is no patch here.

[nickm]

small/medium => 2.

[dgoulet]

This is a bit more complicated. The warning is a general one that is used for different purposes. So we can't really error because there is this mode where we can also auto fix it for you thus the warning makes sense in that case.

Ok, maybe we could do that for the hidden service directory actually, auto-fixing it. We would simply need to call check_private_dir without the CPD_CHECK_MODE_ONLY so once it realizes that the perms are incorrect, it could then go on and fix them to 0700.

Should we?

[teor]

Milestone renamed

[nickm]

Finally admitting that 0.3.??? was a euphemism for Tor: unspecified all along.

[nickm]

I see nothing wrong with fixing the permissions here if we find them incorrect, rather than prompting the user to do so.

[nickm]

Remove an old triaging keyword.

[arma]

I am a fan of auto fixing permissions when we would otherwise fail.