0.4.0 — onion service never publishes descriptor; "Found secret key but not .../hs_0//hs_ed25519_public_key. Regenerating."

Services Support
1

Hope everyone is well,

I am running into a wall here. I have generated a StartOSUI Tor URL and I’d like to access the server from anywhere in the world or any other wifi / data. When I go to tor on different devices I put the url in and it just loads forever until it times out.

Setup: StartOS 0.4.0 on an x86 mini PC (Beelink). Tor 0.4.9.12 installed from the marketplace.

Goal: reach the StartOS admin UI over Tor from outside my LAN.

What I did

  • Installed the Tor service from the marketplace, started it, confirmed healthy.
  • Added an onion service to start-os / admin / admin-ui, SSL off, no vanity private key.
  • Tested the .onion in Tor Browser from off-LAN (phone on cell data, and desktop).

Result: times out every time. Tor Browser parses and resolves the address fine — the error is “The connection has timed out”, not a DNS or malformed-address failure — so nothing is answering on it.

Already ruled out

  • Tor bootstraps to 100% within seconds on every restart. Consensus healthy, exit nodes present.
  • Other onion sites (the DuckDuckGo onion) load fine from the same client, so my Tor client and network are not the problem.
  • Ran Reset Tor Connection. No change.
  • Relay mode had been enabled at one point; turned it off and confirmed the “configured as a relay and a hidden service” warning no longer appears.
  • Fully uninstalled Tor, reinstalled clean, created a single fresh onion and nothing else. Same result.
  • Tested off-LAN, not from the same network as the server.

What the logs show

  1. Every time an onion is created or the config reloads:
Sep 12 20:50:18.000 [notice] Found secret key but not /var/lib/tor/hidden_services/start-os/admin/hs_0//hs_ed25519_public_key. Regenerating.

Note the doubled slash in hs_0//hs_ed25519_public_key. The same line appeared for an Ollama onion at /var/lib/tor/hidden_services/ollama/api-multi/hs_0//hs_ed25519_public_key.

  1. No descriptor upload or HSDir publish entries anywhere in ~10,000 lines of logs spanning about three weeks.

  2. Heartbeat lines read: Our onion services received 0 v3 INTRODUCE2 cells and attempted to launch 0 rendezvous circuits.

Question: is that path with the doubled slash expected? It looks like the public key file never lands where Tor expects it and the service is never published. Anything else I should check, or is this a bug?

If anyone has any ideas on how I can access my server I’d greatly appreciate it.

-Andrew

2

Hi Andrew,

Good news — this is a known issue and nothing is wrong with your setup or your Tor install.

On 0.4.0 and 0.4.0.1, the http:// .onion for the StartOS interface itself never answers — it just hangs, exactly as you describe. The https:// .onion for that same interface works normally. Go to the same Interfaces page and use the https:// address instead. Onion addresses for installed services are unaffected.

Details here: The StartOS UI's http:// .onion address times out on 0.4.0 and 0.4.0.1 — use the https:// one · Issue #5 · Start9Labs/advisories · GitHub

Please don’t delete the onion address — removing the last port on a .onion destroys its key material and the address is gone for good. No need to create a new one either; a fresh address fails the same way.

0.4.0.2 fixes this. When you update, Tor re-points your existing addresses on its own — nothing to re-add and no address lost.

Let me know if the https:// one also fails, because then we’re looking at something different.

-h0mer