1253787 - Sync says logged in yet not doing Sync, logs not helpful

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Firefox :: Sync, defect)

Description

[EventHorizon]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:47.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/47.0
Build ID: 20160304030206

Steps to reproduce:

47.0a1 (2016-03-04)
Ubuntu 16.04

been using Nightly for years doing daily refreshes
Sync stopped working after password reset, yet logged into Sync OK
Sync logs unclear ... Sync fails yet no apparent reason
Sync logs not getting updated since yesterday


Actual results:

Sync is not active, not getting anything synched

FF needs better UI widget to tell us Sync is failing.
Currently Sync is not working yet says its logged in OK
Sync logs are not getting updated, last log update yesterday
even after machine reboot and relaunch of FF Nightly

Here is gist of most recent Sync log

https://gist.github.com/scottstensland/dcaf5e98cf59a628a05e






Expected results:

nothing is getting Sync'd

Comment 1

[Ryan Kelly [:rfkelly]]

Thanks for reporting this, I'll see what I can find out from the log...

> Sync logs not getting updated since yesterday

Unless specially configured, sync will not write logs when (it believes that) it has completed successfully.

> Sync stopped working after password reset, yet logged into Sync OK
> ...
> nothing is getting Sync'd

I fear this may be the source of the trouble.  The data in sync is encrypted using your account password.  If you reset the password, there's no way to access any data that was previously synced, and Firefox has no choice but to start again from scratch.  It will re-upload all your bookmarks/passwords/etc from the local profile, but it can't retrieve anything that was only stored encrypted on the server.

To confirm whether this is what's happened in your case, can you please say more about what led you to do the password reset, whether this was a fresh profile, or whether you have other devices that are also connected to sync?

Comment 2

[Ryan Kelly [:rfkelly]]

> 1457141704767	FirefoxAccounts	WARN	Unknown FxA field name in user data, treating as in-memory: customizeSync
> 1457141704768 FirefoxAccounts WARN Unknown FxA field name in user data, treating as in-memory: declinedSyncEngines

:markh, is it normal for us to log warnings about these entirely-known-and-expected fields, or does this indicate that something else might be going on?  There's a *lot* of data about setting signed-in-user and writing fields in this log, but maybe that's just because it's at trace level.

Comment 3

[Mark Hammond [:markh] [:mhammond]]

(In reply to Ryan Kelly [:rfkelly] from comment #2)
> :markh, is it normal for us to log warnings about these
> entirely-known-and-expected fields, or does this indicate that something
> else might be going on?  There's a *lot* of data about setting
> signed-in-user and writing fields in this log, but maybe that's just because
> it's at trace level.

Yeah, that log looks normal - it's a minor bug that we are attempting to write those fields to storage, but they will be ignored and lost after the next restart - which is appropriate for those fields.

As Ryan mentioned, I believe Sync thinks it is working normally, hence no error logs. The one attached log is certainly reflecting a successful sync.

Comment 4

[Mark Hammond [:markh] [:mhammond]]

No word from the reporter in 2 months - please reopen this bug if you are still having problems.