Hi all
It seems like there is a bit of confusion about the Windows Installer's
"Did not respond to signal" errors, so I'd like to explain what it
means, and hopefully clear up any misunderstandings.
--- What happens? ---
The error is thrown in a messagebox to the user when the Freenet Starter
(the platform glue that handles UAC elevation and sends the start signal
to the service) detects that the wrapper fails during startup
(technically: the service status goes from STARTING -> STOPPED instead
of STARTING -> RUNNING).
This doesn't really have anything to do with the installer, as all of
these failures happen in the wrapper. The installer is, however, nice
enough to tell the user that the wrapper startup failed. In the next
version, I will clarify the error messsage and ask the user to look at
wrapper.log for more information instead.
--- So why does the wrapper fail? ---
If wrapper.log contains only the line:
STATUS | wrapper | 2009/10/30 17:16:22 | Freenet background service
installed.
... it means that the wrapper (when it had admin permissions) succeeded
in installing the service. The lack of any more lines suggests that the
wrapper (and thereby the LocalService account) is missing read/write
permissions to the installation folder. We explicitly give this out
during installation, so this shouldn't happen. However, various sources
suggest that this sometimes fails, but nobody has been able to reproduce
or help me debug it. I'm constantly trying to work with reporters, but
they have a tendency to disappear just as quickly as they arrive.
Besides the case mentioned above, every other report seems to be random
stuff. I've seen:
- One error about the user missing read access to the Java files (which
you obviously should have if you want to run Java software)
- One about the node being too slow to start (and thereby being killed
by the Windows service system)
- One about a user manually moving the datastore but not giving the
service permissions to write to the new location
- One case where reinstallation fixed the issue
- One where the user's system was so messed up that he couldn't even
access the Windows event viewer
- One where the LocalService account has lost parts of its registry
access to normal Windows keys
We could technically check for some of the above issues and warn the
user before installation, but I'm afraid that they will just keep coming
around in new flavors. If the user's system is messed up, anything can
happen really...
Note that I cannot reproduce any of these myself. I've tried numerous
times on XP, Vista and Win7 machines (32 + 64 bit) without any luck.
--- Reporting the bug ---
I appreciate that people are submitting failures to
https://bugs.freenetproject.org/view.php?id=3624 - but I cannot do much
about them without the proper information. Please see
http://new-wiki.freenetproject.org/Installing_on_Windows#Service_did_not_respond_to_signal.
--- The old installer ---
I have no idea why some (toad!?!) are recommending people to use the old
Java installer, but I'd like to seriously recommend you *not* to do so.
It will *not* work on Vista and Win7 because it does not handle UAC
elevation in any way. It might work on XP, but has several big privacy
flaws (it will leave lots of traces that the uninstaller won't remove)
and uses the clumsy custom freenet user, besides not having been
maintained for years.
Please understand that this is nothing personal against the previous
maintainer(s). I'm only concerned about not messing up our users' systems.
- Zero3
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