1657942 - Make WDBA Killswitch (`default-browser-agent debug-remote-disabled`) reveal status in more forms

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(Toolkit :: Default Browser Agent, defect)

Description

[Catalin Sasca, Desktop Test Engineering [:csasca]]

Attachment: No Output.png

Affected versions

• Firefox 80.0b5
• Firefox 81.0a1

Affected platforms

• Windows 10 & 7

Steps to reproduce

1. Install Firefox
2. Launch Command Prompt
3. Navigate to the location of firefox.exe (installation directory) in Comand Prompt
4. Insert "default-browser-agent.exe debug-remote-disabled" string

Expected result

• An output with details regarding wdba's task status is shown

Actual result

• Nothing happens

Regression range

• This is not a regression

Additional notes

• The attachment shows the output comparation from the try build's output and 80.0b5

Comment 1

[Nick Alexander :nalexander [he/him] (PTO Feb 24-March 3)]

There's a lot going on here, so let me explain.

1. The default-browser-agent.exe debug-remote-disabled functionality is happening; it's just that the output is not being displayed.

2. To witness the output of debug-remote-disabled, snoop the registry under key Computer\HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Mozilla\Firefox\Default Browser Agent. Inside that you'll find values with names like C:\Program Files\Firefox Nightly|DefaultAgentLastRemoteDisabled and binary values where 0 means "not disabled" and 1 means "disabled". You can delete this value and watch it be recreated to be confident things are being checked.

3. To test the two cases, set the Firefox pref services.settings.server to:

• prod (default), https://firefox.settings.services.mozilla.com/v1 for "not disabled"
• stage, https://settings.stage.mozaws.net/v1 for "disabled"

Now, what's going on with the output. I think fundamentally this is about the MOZ_WINCONSOLE flag. We won't create a Windows console (to avoid disturbing the user when running in the background) but it looks like we aren't attaching to an existing one either. That's not what I expected. We can either fix that or we can send this output uniformly to the Windows event log where it can be seen in Event Viewer.

Simultaneously, we don't have quite as much Rust-level logging as would have answered this question: we don't give, say, the record body contents at debug level, or even print the remote disablement result at info level.

Finally, we don't exit with a disablement status from debug-remote-disabled.

I'll morph this ticket to address some of the latter bits, but I think using the registry value is enough to unblock testing. Catalin, can you try that and see where you get to? Thanks!

Comment 2

[Tania Maity (:tmaity)]

No Severity has been set for this bug, Nick, could you please help?

Comment 3

[Rachel Tublitz [:rachel]]

Nick -> Kirk for setting severity here as Kirk's our triage person this month. (Triage calendar here)

Comment 4

[Nick Rishel [:nrishel]]

The Default Agent kill switch has since been removed, obviating this issue.