Provide feedback mechanism for clock-skew and other bad problems

TBB 3.0 currently has a button to copy Tor logs to the clipboard. It's good enough to enable support by knowledgeable people, but it is also good to enable at least a minimal level of self-support.

One misconfiguration that can prevent Tor from working is clock-skew. Vidalia made a bright red message out of it. Having some feedback mechanism in TBB 3.0 for similar critical issues would be good.

added AffectsTails component::applications/tor launcher extdev-interview owner::brade priority::high severity::normal status::assigned tbb-3.0 tbb-helpdesk-frequent tbb-usability type::defect labels

Do you know if clock-skew is reported as a bootstrap warning by tor? How does Vidalia detect critical issues?

Tor Launcher currently displays an error alert when it receives a WARN BOOTSTRAP event from tor with RECOMMENDATION=warn.

Trac:
Cc: N/A to mcs
Status: new to assigned

Just tried on TBB 3.0a3, setting time to more than 24h in the past. The message appear on the terminal, categorized as “warn”, but Tor Launcher gets stuck saying “Loading authority key certs”.

I still think showing the log in the browser (or an add-on window) is something nice to have. (#9516 (moved)) (I did not know that one can copy the log to the clipboard)

The second part of #9516 (moved) (which was an alternative) is most likely what this ticket is heading towards to.

We modified Tor Launcher to highlight the fact that tor generated a warning or error message. A caution / warning icon is added to the "Open Settings" button within the progress dialog. The same icon is also added to the "Copy Tor Log To Clipboard" button within the Network Settings dialog / wizard.

https://gitweb.torproject.org/tor-launcher.git/commit/8a64ec3b07e2bfe82ab47401993f52f4ec5b0163

However, the solution is not perfect because the warning about clock skew is sometimes output by tor before Tor Launcher has opened a control port connection (which is how Tor Launcher receives the log messages from tor). I think we will need some advice from the tor developers to find a way to capture all of the log messages.

Trac:
Parent: N/A to #10059 (moved)

Trac:
Parent: #10059 (moved) to N/A

Trac:
Keywords: N/A deleted, extdev-interview added

Trac:
Keywords: N/A deleted, tbb-usability, tbb-helpdesk-frequent added

Trac:
Cc: mcs to mcs, Sherief

Trac:
Cc: mcs, Sherief to mcs, Sherief, whonix-devel@whonix.org

It's not a blocker, somehow, this was added and I can't seem to be able to remove it...

Trac:
Reviewer: N/A to N/A
Keywords: N/A deleted, AffectsTails added
Sponsor: N/A to N/A
Severity: N/A to Blocker

related: #3652 (moved)

Trac:
Username: fem
Severity: Blocker to Normal

Trac:
Cc: mcs, Sherief, whonix-devel@whonix.org to mcs, Sherief, whonix-devel@whonix.org, arthuredelstein

During the weekly Tor Browser dev meeting on IRC today, it was suggested that Tor Launcher might be able to detect clock skew by listening for CLOCK_SKEW events.

For reference, here is the Vidalia code that handles CLOCK_SKEW events (the user-visible messages used are worth looking at if nothing else):

TorEvents::handleGeneralStatusEvent(): https://gitweb.torproject.org/vidalia.git/tree/src/torcontrol/TorEvents.cpp#n319

StatusEventWidget::clockSkewed(): https://gitweb.torproject.org/vidalia.git/tree/src/vidalia/log/StatusEventWidget.cpp#n355

I would say this is the #1 usability problem in terms of user support mails that arrive to execdir@.

Replying to arma:

I would say this is the #1 usability problem in terms of user support mails that arrive to execdir@.

I guess that is not too surprising. Kathy and I looked at adding support for CLOCK_SKEW events a couple of months ago but then got interrupted with other work. But if I remember correctly, we found that Tor Launcher misses the CLOCK_SKEW event that happens early during tor startup for the same reason Tor Launcher misses other things: it is not connected to the control port yet. That means our best hope at the moment for fixing this problem is #21542 (moved) (which would allow Tor Launcher to capture log messages via stderr).

Trac:
Cc: mcs, Sherief, whonix-devel@whonix.org, arthuredelstein to mcs, Sherief, whonix-devel@whonix.org, arthuredelstein, gk

In the user support mails, they are sending us the output of "copy logs to clipboard". Those logs come from events, right?

I think for many of the users, Tor is stuck in a loop where it tries to fetch a directory object, gets upset about its clock and aborts that try, and then does it again a little while later. So even if Tor Launcher misses the first few iterations of that loop, there are plenty more iterations after that.