icedove is just not working any more

The host was shutdown yesterday (5 August) and when started up again, I
could only see messages up to 27 July

Normally at startup it asks for the master password, this prompt is not
appearing

I enabled debugging:


    NSPR_LOG_MODULE=IMAP:5 NSPR_LOG_FILE=~/icedove-issue.log icedove


and in the log file I see:

 1115800:th3:NA:CreateNewLineFromSocket: * OK [CAPABILITY IMAP4rev1
LITERAL+ SASL-IR LOGIN-REFERRALS ID ENABLE IDLE AUTH=PLAIN] Dovecot ready.
 try to log in
 IMAP auth: server caps 0x4085425, pref 0x1006, failed 0x0, avail caps
0x1004
 (GSSAPI = 0x1000000, CRAM = 0x20000, NTLM = 0x100000, MSN =  0x200000,
PLAIN = 0x1000, LOGIN = 0x2, old-style IMAP login = 0x4)auth external
IMAP login = 0x20000000
 trying auth method 0x1000
 IMAP: password prompt failed or user canceled it
 login failed entirely



The mail server log shows that there was a connection and no attempt to
authenticate

There was no password prompt on the client, either for the account
password or the master password

I stopped the process and went into the profile directory and did

$ sqlite3 signons.sqlite
SQLite version 3.8.7.1 2014-10-29 13:59:56
Enter ".help" for usage hints.
sqlite> PRAGMA integrity_check;
Error: database is locked
sqlite>


so it appears the sqlite file was corrupted at shutdown.  Why doesn't
icedove inform me that the file is corrupt, why does it just sit there
showing me old messages and giving no feedback there is a problem?

I tried to work around this by moving the ~/.icedove directory to a
backup location, shutting down icedove on my laptop and then copying the
~/.icedove directory from laptop to desktop home directory

Upon starting up, it still isn't prompting me for the master password.

I also tried starting up in safe made, it still doesn't resolve the issue.

Does it depend on some other (potentially corrupt) file outside
~/.icedove?  Why doesn't it display an error to tell me what is wrong
and where to look?

I did some more tests

I moved the following to a backup location:
   ~/.icedove
   ~/.thunderbird
   ~/.cache/icedove

so it should create a completely new profile.

Then I run it in safe mode to avoid any plugins:

$ icedove -safe-mode

The main window appears but it is unresponsive to any mouse clicks on
any of the buttons or menus.  I looked for any modal popup windows or
dialogs that may have blocked mouse clicks on the main window but I
couldn't find any.

I attach a screenshot.  The console output is:

$ icedove -safe-mode

(process:7319): GLib-CRITICAL **: g_slice_set_config: assertion
'sys_page_size == 0' failed
TypeError: nounDef is undefined
-- Exception object --
*
-- Stack Trace --
gloda_ns_newQuery@resource:///modules/gloda/gloda.js:1897:5
ContactIdentityCompleter@resource://gre/components/glautocomp.js:178:7
nsAutoCompleteGloda@resource://gre/components/glautocomp.js:493:5
XPCOMUtils__getFactory/factory.createInstance@resource://gre/modules/XPCOMUtils.jsm:271:11
glodaSearch_XBL_Constructor@chrome://messenger/content/search.xml:75:1




I used strace to capture all activity during startup and tried to work
out what else it may have been looking for in $HOME.  There were over
1500 references to distinct files in $HOME

Hello Daniel,

~/.thunderbird is completely unrelated to Debian's Icedove, this comes
from something different.
The cached files should be safe, but it's no problem to move them out of
the way.

I have currently absolutely no clue what could be going wrong here.
The diff between 31.7.0 and 31.8.0 is not spectacul and I can't really
believe that Mozilla has something broken by this update. You are the
currently first and only person that reports such strange working mode.

This messages on the console are quite a good sign as they are small.
As you wrote you have created a completely new profile thre must be
something different. The last time I saw such behavior was by using the
upstream Lightning package and not the iceowl-extension package, but
this is irrelevant here, you are running a new profile.
Could remove the various plugins via apt-get remove (or similar) to
figure out if probably some plugins are ignoring the safe mode?

But I suspect something on the file system, isn't there something spurious to
see while strace is running?
You are not working on a NFS/CIFS or BTRFS filesystem?

Happen this all on a new profile if you using the older version 31.7.0
from snapshots.d.o.

In version 31.8.0 we have to use the internal libnss library as the
Jessie version is now to old.

What files?
That confirms my minds that the file system could be corrupted.

I moved it out of the way just in case, it had been there a long time

I'm not certain that it was brought about by the upgrade or some other issue

I tried removing two extensions that were installed as packages:

xul-ext-tbdialout
iceowl-extension

and this didn't resolve the issue

I haven't gone through the strace output in great detail yet

It is a BtrFs filesystem accessed over NFS

It has been working this way for a long time

I checked the BtrFs filesystem and it definitely has free space and free
metadata space (I understand there can be problems when these fill up
and people don't realize it)

Even if there is something corrupt, why can't Icedove create a new
profile or give an error to explain where it is stuck?

Let me see if there is a way to summarize what it is trying to access

In some cases it is trying to access things which don't exist, e.g.
searching for a particular file in various places.  Some of these
accesses to $HOME appear to be from libraries rather than Icedove itself.

Regards,

Daniel

There is also #757199, that is BTRFS related.
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=757199

Maybe you find some similarity to your behavior.

Well, that's a common problem of the main software public interesst out
there. The variety of possibilities is much wider on Linux platforms
than on Windows. And unfortunately Windows users are the bigger part of
users. There are many many small issues living for more than five years ...

And Thunderbird is just again on the way to get the problems summarized
and solved after the loss of main support by the Mozilla Coorporation.

We can't do much here, the code base is just too big to make anything
useful in my sparse free time. Sorry, but I can't make any promisses
here.

Could you please check if you move the profile to a "normal" local
filesystem problems are gone?
I think the behavior is more or less the same as on bug report #757199.

Regards
Carsten

Ok, I finally found the root cause of this problem

On the NFS server, dmesg output included the line:

  "lockd: cannot monitor host1"

repeated many times.  It would appear several times each time I tried to
start icedove.

Looking in other logs, I found that /var had filled up on the NFS server
and this was causing problems for the lockd process to write in
/var/lib/nfs/*

There had been no other obvious signs of trouble and the lack of
feedback from Icedove and the log line telling me "password prompt
failed or user canceled it" was a distraction from spotting the real
problem.

So, Icedove is not specifically broken, it is just giving really
inadequate feedback in the case of problems like this.

I'm thinking a sort of different about that.
From a point of view from the application it looks not as it seems on
the first sight. Every application must assume that the underlaying
parts are working correctly and a fail safe mechanism is doing his job
right. So Icedove can't do anything on the filesystem side (and hasen't
to do that!), for Icedove it doesn't matter if you are working on a
local harddisk or a network filesystem. On the other hand a network FS
has other properties than a FS on a local disk. But that has to be
handled by FS implementation.

So what should Icedove/Thunderbird doing here? It's some kind of blind
on the eyes for normal reasons.

Maybe some small messages from Icedove could be improved but I don't
think there is much to do here. Feel free to open requests on the
Mozilla Bugtracker.

It's no hard issue to blame on Icedove, I lowered down the severity of
this report to important.

Regards
Carsten

I don't think it is reasonable to expect Icedove to diagnose specific
problems with NFS

However:

- when I tried to create a new profile, the Icedove window would just
freeze.  At the very least, it should have some timeout and display some
popup saying "Couldn't get lock" or whatever it was trying to do.

- when I tried to run it with the existing profile, it was making
connections to the server, then it realized it needed the password and
then it appears that it tried to access the signons.sqlite file,
couldn't get a lock and just gave up without informing me.  Then it
logged the message saying "password prompt failed or user canceled it".
 That is misleading.  The log message should have said something like
"couldn't lock signons.sqlite" and maybe that should have displayed a
popup too.


In both cases, I wouldn't expect Icedove to know why the lock is failing
(e.g. the NFS server filling up /var) but it should tell the user that
some locking operation failed and they should contact their sysadmin or
whatever.

I agree these problems are not specific to Icedove and they are upstream
issues.  I'm happy to go and put them in upstream Bugzilla, did you ever
see anything like this in there already?

Regards,

Daniel

Laba diena,


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Parašykite, kurias veiklas išsirinkote
ir atsiųsime pavyzdį ir pasiūlymą su sąlygomis įmonių bazei įsigyti



Pagarbiai,
Tadas Giedraitis
Tel. nr. +37067881041

Laba diena,


Noriu Jus informuoti apie šių metų pasikeitimą dėl atnaujintos visos Lietuvos įmonių bazės 2018 metų sausio vidurio.
Visi juridiniai asmenys pateikti bazėje yra veikiantys, realiai vykdantys veiklą, turintys įdarbintų darbuotojų. Duomenys pagal Sodrą, Registrų centrą.

Bazėje nurodoma ir apyvarta, darbuotojų atlyginimai, darbuotojų skaičius, transporto skaičius ir daug kitų duomenų, kuriuos matysite pavyzdyje.

Duomenis galima filtruoti pagal veiklas, miestus ir kitus duomenis.


Šią bazę verta turėti visoms įmonėms. Pateiksiu priežastis:

1) Kontaktai pateikti bazėje direktorių ir kitų atsakingų asmenų, didelė tikimybė Jums surasti naujų klientų, partnerių, tiekėjų, kai tiesiogiai bendrausite su direktoriais, komercijos vadovais.

2) Konkurentų analizavimas, tiekėjų atsirinkimas pagal Jums reikalingus kriterijus, galite atsifiltruoti pagal įmonės dydį, bazėje nurodoma kiek įmonės skolingos Sodrai.

3) Lengva, greita ir patogu dirbti su šia baze, elektroninius pašto adresus galite importuoti į elektroninių laiškų siuntimo programas ar sistemas iš kurių siunčiate elektroninius laiškus.
Taip pat galite importuoti mobiliųjų telefonų numerius į SMS siuntimo programas.


Išsirinkite iš "Veiklų sąrašo" veiklas kurių Jums reikia.
( Sąrašas prisegtas laiške excel faile )

Parašykite, kurias veiklas išsirinkote
ir atsiųsime pavyzdį ir pasiūlymą su sąlygomis įmonių bazei įsigyti



Pagarbiai,
Tadas Giedraitis
Tel. nr. +37067881041