Bug #16413

Onion Circuits window is not responding

Added by scootergrisen 2019-01-31 22:16:06 . Updated 2019-02-06 17:13:33 .

Status:
Confirmed
Priority:
Low
Assignee:
Category:
Target version:
Start date:
2019-01-31
Due date:
% Done:

0%

Feature Branch:
Type of work:
Code
Blueprint:

Starter:
Affected tool:
Onion Circuits
Deliverable for:

Description

With network connection disabled and starting Onion Circuits at the top of the window it says:

You are not connected to Tor yet…

This freezes the window (not responding) so i can’t move it or anything.

With network connection enabled the window is working fine.

Using tails-amd64-3.12.iso

Subtasks

History

#1 Updated by mercedes508 2019-02-03 14:40:33

  • Status changed from New to Confirmed
  • Assignee set to alant
  • Priority changed from Normal to Low
  • Target version set to Tails_3.13

OK, so yes, when network is disabled form greeter, when opening onion circuits, it doesn’t freeze the system, but the onion circuits window is not actionable (can’t close/resize it by clicking on buttons).

Which is really low prio because anyway if you don’t use network, you don’t have to use onion circuits at all.

#2 Updated by intrigeri 2019-02-05 12:04:05

  • Assignee deleted (alant)
  • Target version deleted (Tails_3.13)

#3 Updated by tailshark 2019-02-06 04:17:12

There are a handful of weird things with onion circuits and I’m not sure if they’re an upstream problem or not.

Examples:

- If you disconnect and reconnect repeatedly with the onion circuits window open it can stop reporting anything at all. That is: You’ll get a blank/empty circuit window while you’re actually connected to Tor. (problem state manifests intermittently)

- If you disconnect and reconnect repeatedly with the onion circuits window open the circuits can display but you can’t click or scroll on the circuits themselves. It’ll always auto-scroll you to the top circuit when you try to click or interact with entries in the window. (problem state manifests intermittently)

- In some cases Onion Circuits will just outright freeze when disconnect/reconnecting.

The fix for all of the above has been to close onion circuits (perhaps forcibly) and turn it back on. I’m sort of getting accustomed to force-closing onion circuits and opening it again. I sometimes use Tails on a finnicky LAN environment with a proxy exit so I may be noticing this more than most.

On that note there is a corollary issue that is more difficult to demonstrate. The “onion-grater” service can begin consuming high CPU for no apparent reason after long periods of uptime and several disconnects/reconnects. Simply restarting the service “service onion-grater restart” seems to fix it. I thought I would bring this up since onion-grater seems to provide a data feed for onion circuits. It’s possible there is some kind of race condition or connection handling problem between the two.

I’m not expecting anyone to leap to try and fix this. I haven’t bothered myself since it’s a menial chore to restart the window/service. But I thought having more information here on the record is better than less.

#4 Updated by intrigeri 2019-02-06 08:59:49

> There are a handful of weird things with onion circuits and I’m not sure if they’re an upstream problem or not.

Please report each of these problems as a separate issue (after checking whether there’s already one). Thanks!

#5 Updated by tailshark 2019-02-06 17:13:33

My threshold for caring stops at two posts hijacking the existing ticket. :)

If someone else complains maybe the above data points will help.