435750 - Weave does not support synchronistion to network drives

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Cloud Services :: General, defect)

Description

[Daniel Maddox]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9) Gecko/2008051206 Firefox/3.0
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9) Gecko/2008051206 Firefox/3.0

I have installed weave (And firefox) to my 'network area' on my university network. FF works fine and so too did Weave until approximately April time. Since then when I sync it fails - it used to say could not write to //userfs.... (the address of the drive).

Since updating to 0.1.30 Even logging in now fails - with no information going into the log

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1.Click sign in
2.Shows error symbol
3.Prompts for details again
4.Fails and stops asking
Actual Results:  
I see error, and a red symbol/icon in the status area. No data is put into the log window

Expected Results:  
To be able to log in, and subsequently synchronise data.

As previously stated, weave used to work fine. It would appear (possibly after 0.1.28) it would not sync to a network area (address //...) and since 0.1.30 will not even log in. I have tried creating a new account, which also fails to log in.

Comment 1

[Dan Mills [:thunder]]

I'm not exactly sure what you mean.  Are you saying your profile is on a network drive?  Or that you are setting the "server location" in the advanced page of the weave prefs?

I'm assuming you mean the profile is on a network-mounted drive, and in that case I'm targeting this bug for 0.3.

Comment 2

[Daniel Maddox]

Sorry, if it wasn't clear before (I'm not really sure how to articulate this).

Basically wherever/however you store the data locally on the machine running weave it does not support doing this to a network drive. I am attempting to synchronise to the default mozilla server, the issues seem to be arising from not being able to store stuff locally - firefox is installed and works normally on there fine.

Comment 3

[Dan Mills [:thunder]]

Okay.  As choosing a local storage location is not a weave option, I assume you've set up Firefox to store all your profile information on a network mount.

Or do you mean where the application itself is installed?

Comment 4

[Daniel Maddox]

The application (firefox) is installed on the network mount and functions perfectly as itself. I believe it stores local bookmarks, cookies etc. in that install directory/network mount area successfully.

As the idea of weave is to allow "your" browser to be where you log in, that support for this situation (which is a fairly common end-user set up I'd imagine) needs to be considered at some point. Currently, if I were to put my settings manually onto a USB stick I could transfer that to the networked PC fine, and could pick it up wherever I log in. Weave (as I understand it) is meant to negate the need for the USB stick...

Technically its not a bug I guess (unless you consider that it used to work and now doesn't), but its something that is worthy of bug-status.

Comment 5

[Dan Mills [:thunder]]

(In reply to comment #4)
> The application (firefox) is installed on the network mount and functions
> perfectly as itself. I believe it stores local bookmarks, cookies etc. in that
> install directory/network mount area successfully.

I think this is part of the confusion.  Firefox does not usually store bookmarks, cookies, etc. inside (or next to) the Firefox application itself.  Instead, it stores it in the "profile" directory.  The exception is some versions of Firefox made for USB sticks, which store the profile inside the Firefox app.

On Windows, you can usually find the profile by digging in the AppData dir:

* Start->run, type "%AppData%" (w/o quotes).
* I forget the exact location, but look in Roaming/Mozilla/Profiles or somesuch.

You should find a directory with a partially random name (e.g., "3nd9q.default").  That's your profile.

> Technically its not a bug I guess (unless you consider that it used to work and
> now doesn't), but its something that is worthy of bug-status.

I still don't quite understand exactly what your setup is, or what is going wrong (I mean, I understand the high level description, but not the details).

Comment 6

[Daniel Maddox]

(In reply to comment #5)
> (In reply to comment #4)
> > The application (firefox) is installed on the network mount and functions
> > perfectly as itself. I believe it stores local bookmarks, cookies etc. in that
> > install directory/network mount area successfully.
> 
> I think this is part of the confusion.  Firefox does not usually store
> bookmarks, cookies, etc. inside (or next to) the Firefox application itself. 
> Instead, it stores it in the "profile" directory.  The exception is some
> versions of Firefox made for USB sticks, which store the profile inside the
> Firefox app.
> 
> On Windows, you can usually find the profile by digging in the AppData dir:
> 
> * Start->run, type "%AppData%" (w/o quotes).
> * I forget the exact location, but look in Roaming/Mozilla/Profiles or
> somesuch.
> 
> You should find a directory with a partially random name (e.g.,
> "3nd9q.default").  That's your profile.

I certainly have a 'normal' version of FF3B, therefore perhaps that is an error on my part causing confusion. The app data (as it would be seen in a normal copy of XP on a home PC) is stored within our network user profiles - meaning wherever we log in we pick up desktops, icons, customisations everything as if it were a normal PC - included within this is history, bookmarks, cookies etc. I see my slight mistake - however the issue is still effectively the same; user data is stored on a remote source (our network user area) and is addressed as //userfs/... etc. this "//" which is employed (instead of say, "M:/") to access the network area/drive causes issues within the weave code (but not firefox). Firefox is fully functional and has no issues writing to these unusual addresses, however Weave does have issues... which ideally should be fixed.


 
> > Technically its not a bug I guess (unless you consider that it used to work and
> > now doesn't), but its something that is worthy of bug-status.
> 
> I still don't quite understand exactly what your setup is, or what is going
> wrong (I mean, I understand the high level description, but not the details).
> 
The fine details are kind of already described in the first chunk I've written - user data (app data included) is all stored remotely and picked up during log in by XP on a network PC. Writing to a remote location seems fine for firefox (stuff gets remembered) but this is not the case with weave - it seems "//" causes the code to fail - leading to errors (which, I suspect, cannot be logged within the error log because of the fact that it cannot save! - resulting in an empty error log, unfortunately.)

I hope this helps to some degree. I am not a developer and so find it difficult to submit information which is perfect... I am using the software as more of a end-user that wants to contribute to development by passing on suggestions. I can see what is unusual in my set-up (compared to a home computer) and can only assume that this is the cause. The fact that weave isn't reporting anything in the error log is a pretty major issue to not being able to resolve this. 

I would suggest that it simply is something to do with your coding language/syntax and "//" (From the very little knowledge I have I believe // is used to write comments in code?) Therefore weave is probably ignoring everything after it incorrectly assuming it as a comment. I'm sure there are ways to address this, however personally cannot shed any light as I am not a coder. 

All I can do is provide feedback from what I see as a user. Sorry! :-/

Comment 7

[Dan Mills [:thunder]]

Hey, no worries.  Thanks for answering my questions.

My guess is the openssl wrapper is not dealing with the network-mounted paths correctly.  We will switch to a binary component soon, so perhaps the problem will go away then.

Otherwise, I'll leave this bug targeted at 0.3.

Comment 8

[Daniel Maddox]

Awesome. I'll keep you posted as an when new updates download ;-)

Comment 9

[Daniel Maddox]

(In reply to comment #8)
> Awesome. I'll keep you posted as an when new updates download ;-)

Having just returned to uni and downloaded V0.2.6 It syncs perfectly now! 

Bug Fixed 8-)