[tor-dev] Flashproxy alpha bundles

[David Fifield]

Thank you for testing! This report is very helpful.

On Thu, Dec 13, 2012 at 07:59:31PM +0100, Sebastian G. <bastik.tor> wrote:
> > - If it didn't work, was it at least clear what was wrong?
> 
> I thought the progress would have stopped here, but it just took much
> longer than expected.
> 
> [Notice] Bootstrapped 50%: Loading relay descriptors.
> 
> Starting TBB again, reduces the time.
> 
> Might be the proxy that is in use, because on retrying again, I "stuck"
> at 85% or 90%.

That is interesting. I have often seen Tor stall at 50%. During that
time there is no network traffic for about 60 seconds, so it's not just
that downloading descriptors is slow. After about 60 seconds, it starts
downloading descriptors. I haven't figured out why.

Stalling at 85% might mean that you got only one proxy, when two are
required to bootstrap, recently and for yet-unknown reasons.
https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-dev/2012-December/004260.html
If you go into the bundle and run the flashproxy-reg-email or
flashproxy-reg-http program, that should be enough to get you more
proxies without restarting Vidalia.

You can get better debugging information by adding something like
	--log flashproxy.txt
to the ClientTransportPlugin line in torrc.

> > - Were you able to use this as your main Tor process for a day?
> 
> Browsing is slower (due to the proxies in use I assume), but aside from
> that I could use it to get the information I require.

It's slower for at least three reasons. One is that you're extending the
network path of the circuit (three Tor hops and one flash proxy hop).
Another is that the websocket bridge relay isn't particularly fast.
Another is that some browsers (only Firefox 10 at this point I think)
don't support binary WebSocket frames and we use base64-encoded text
frames for them instead.

> It's an alpha bundle, but I did not expect it to dump everything where
> the executable was. (Tor Browser\) I thought I would be able to select
> where to extract.
> 
> I also saw a, to some maybe scary, console. Might be alpha stuff.

Oh, thank you. This is good to know. Probably I created the
self-extracting executable in a different way than the official bundles.
(BTW the procedure for making the Windows bundle is here:
https://gitweb.torproject.org/flashproxy.git/blob/HEAD:/doc/bundle-windows.txt.)

David Fifield