[Freedombox-discuss] Tor-Installation disappeared from plinth

[Dieter]

Ah, Sunil, thank you very much for the quick response!

And yes, after installing obfs4proxy, everything started working as
expected.
I installed the package using apt, that worked fine too. :)

On 05/01/16 05:03, Sunil Mohan Adapa wrote:
> On 01/05/2016 03:04 AM, Dieter wrote:
>> Hello!
>>
>> Some time ago, when freedombox-setup was updated in the sid-repo from
>> 0.6 to 0.7, i "lost" my Tor-installation.
>>
>> With that i mean that plinth does not show tor to be installed anymore,
>> although it is installed and running.
>>
>> How does Plinth check for installed packages?
>>
>> Also, i'm not using the standard ORPort setting in Tors torrc, as i'm
>> running the freedombox behind a NAT.
>> And since Plinth does not recognize the installed Tor, firewalld blocks
>> all the connections.
>>
>> What can i do to make Plinth work properly again?
> 
> It is in 0.7, I believe, that we have moved to using obfs4proxy.  This
> requires that an additional package be installed: obfs4proxy.  Plinth
> checks whether all the required packages are installed before accessing
> an application.  After the upgrade, it finds that the new package is
> missing and will ask for installing again.
> 
> Normally this is not a problem because only the additional package will
> get freshly installed and all setup procedures of Plinth are idempotent,
> meaning that running setup multiple times does not mess up things.
> 
> However, the catch is that Plinth's Tor package is one of the last
> package that does not yet properly adhere to the idempotency principle.
>  This may cause your manual configuration changes to be overwritten.
> James Valleroy has already sent in a major overhaul of the Plinth's Tor
> module to fix this issue by using Augeas and at the same time fix issues
> with firewall ports.
> 
> There is also a larger problem with the way Plinth manages such upgrades
> and detects whether something is already setup.  Although the current
> mechanism is a good step from the earlier times and helped us accelerate
> development, we are aware of the limitations.  We have discussed a
> solution and a fix is on the way.
> 
> For now, I suggest that that you take a backup of torrc, proceed with
> Plinth's Tor installation and restore your manual changes to torrc.
>