For some weeks now I get this log messages nearly every other day

,----
| May 31 17:36:34  popularity-contest: unable to submit report.
| May 31 17:36:34  popularity-contest: unable to submit report to http://popcon.debian.org/cgi-bin/popcon.cgi.
`----

I'm aware 1.79 is not the version in oldstable, but since I got the
same errors with the correct oldstable version I backported 1.78 from
stable, didn't help, then installed 1.79 from testing.
To mee this seems to be some problem on the server side, but I might be
wrong…

Hello Jens,

As you can see the number of popcon submitters is rising.

What gives

ls -l /var/log/popularity-contest

(more generally, what is the sizeof the report ?)

Could you try to change the submission time in /etc/cron.d/popularity-contest ?
Maybe the server is overloaded at this time or your report is too large.

Thanks for using popularity-contest!

* Bill Allombert <ballombe@debian.org> wrote:

Hi Bill, after some testing, I think I found the culprit.
I did a
bash -x /etc/cron.daily/popularity-contest and found
the line
,----
| + setsid /usr/bin/torify /usr/share/popularity-contest/popcon-upload -u http://popcon.debian.org/cgi-bin/popcon.cgi -f /var/log/popularity-contest.3881.gp
`----

Wasn't aware that popcon-upload uses Tor at all.
So I added USETOR="no to /etc/popularity-contest.conf, and all of a
sudden, submitting was successful!

I just read https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=960617
where someone had a similar problem with the default USETOR=maybe,
but his tor wasn't running. Mine is running and working, but for some
reason the torify approach didn't work (Works for other programs like
curl and lynx on commandline tests)

Didn't change anything on my tor configuration, but I saw there was an
update on Apr. 7
[UPGRADE] tor:amd64 0.4.7.16-1 -> 0.4.9.6-0+deb12u1
which correlates with the time I saw the first popcon failure messages.

Looks like some change in tor might triggered the problem then.

Cheers,
Jens