372761 - Out-of-date error message that tells people to "install the Personal Security Manager (PSM)".

Status: NEW

(Core :: Networking, defect, P3)

Description

[Wan-Teh Chang]

Even though PSM has become an integral component of the Mozilla
clients for a long time, we're still getting questions from Mozilla
users about how to download and install PSM.  I believe this is
because of this out-of-date error message in
http://lxr.mozilla.org/seamonkey/source/dom/locales/en-US/chrome/appstrings.properties:

unknownSocketType=This document cannot be displayed unless you install the Personal Security Manager (PSM). Download and install PSM and try again, or contact your system administrator.

Comment 1

[Wan-Teh Chang]

One person told me that he gets the error message
"Unexpected response from the server. Firefox doesn't know how
to communicate with the server".  I found that this message also
has the message id 'unknownSocketType', but it's defined in a
different file
http://lxr.mozilla.org/seamonkey/source/browser/locales/en-US/chrome/overrides/appstrings.properties:

unknownSocketType=Firefox doesn't know how to communicate with the server.

See both messages for the message id 'unknownSocketType' at
http://lxr.mozilla.org/seamonkey/search?string=unknownSocketType

Comment 2

[Wan-Teh Chang]

I believe the error message in comment 1 comes from
http://lxr.mozilla.org/seamonkey/source/browser/locales/en-US/chrome/overrides/netError.dtd#109

It also tells the users to "Check to make sure your system has the
Personal Security Manager installed."

Comment 3

[Wan-Teh Chang]

NetLib owners: do you know what the error 'unknownSocketType'
means?  The message for this error is out-of-date (it should
not mention the Personal Security Manager).  We need to find
out under what conditions users may get the 'unknownSocketType'
error, so that we can come up with a better error message to
help them diagnose or fix the problem.

Comment 4

[Boris Zbarsky [:bzbarsky]]

'unknownSocketType' means NS_ERROR_UNKNOWN_SOCKET_TYPE.

NS_ERROR_UNKNOWN_SOCKET_TYPE happens when nsSocketProviderService::GetSocketProvider can't find a socket provider of the given type.  The types we pass to that method (or rather the types for which it does not throw) are "ssl", "starttls", "socks" and "socks4".

But code can ask for other types (e.g. via the socket transport service)...

If docshell sees this error, chances are a --disable-crypto build was asked to load an https:// URL.  Though I'd hope we'd just fail out of newURI for those.

Comment 5

[Christian :Biesinger (don't email me, ping me on IRC)]

> Though I'd hope we'd just fail out of newURI for those.

we don't usually fail URI creation for unsupported protocols. we don't even fail channel creation :-) Why should we do so here?

Comment 6

[Boris Zbarsky [:bzbarsky]]

Er, whatever.  The point is that I'd expect it to not get into the HTTP code... ;)

Comment 7

[Kai Engert (:KaiE:)]

When the Mozilla application code requests an XPCOM interface implemented by the PSM module, an attempt is made to init the NSS library.

There are various scenarios where NSS init fails.
The most popular ones are:
- profile directory (or files) not writable
- some NSS shared library / DLL is missing
- failure in a NSS integrity test

If PSM is unable to init NSS, then PSM will reject the creation of the requested object instance.

This will look identically to a missing PSM.

Comment 8

[Kai Engert (:KaiE:)]

So, I agree the error message is misleading.

I propose we try to find a better wording.

Ideally, NSS should report the exact failure reason, and we should have a list of matching error strings.

Comment 10

[Axel Hecht [:Pike]]

Could we pick this up again? The way the error and the message come together is really "interesting". Even in 2010 ;-)

Comment 11

[Kai Engert (:KaiE:)]

reassign bug owner.
mass-update-kaie-20120918

Comment 12

[Dana Keeler (she/her) (use needinfo) [:keeler] (on leave)]

Necko is what's setting this error code, so I think this probably belongs there.

Comment 13

[Firefox Bug Husbandry Bot]

Bulk change to priority: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1399258

Comment 14

[Firefox Bug Husbandry Bot]

Bulk change to priority: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1399258