Hi all, thanks for your support !
I updated to Tails 3.0-beta2, destroyed the VM, started again, failed again ! My build config is very 'vanilla', I didn't touch anything. So it means that the build happens within the VM, with apt-cacher-ng enabled. The VM has the default settings: 512M of RAM, and enough storage (I didn't find where that one is defined btw). However, after a lot of investigation (mostly in the wrong direction), I'm pretty sure to know what's wrong. It's not Tails, it's not the VM, it's not my config. It seems to be the network here in Vietnam. So yep, I'm living in Vietnam. Overall, the network is not that bad here, however they have a problem with the underwater cable AAG (Asia America Gateway). Basically, from time to time the AAG stops working, and the AAG is the main cable that connects Vietnam to the rest of the world. What happens then is a bit unclear to me, to say the least. Well, from a user point of view, what happens is very clear. The web becomes a bit unreliable. Sometimes, websites are very slow to load, or become completely unavailable for a few minutes. Amazingly, google searches are still fast (more on that later). I've seen `apt-get update` on my machine starting very fast, then slowing down and down, then stalled. So I opened my `sources.list`, got rid of the `httpredir.debian.org` url, replaced by `debian.xtdv.net` (the only Vietnamese Debian mirror that I know) to ensure my traffic remains in Vietnam, and now it works like a charm. From a technical point of view, what happens is quite unclear. I played a bit with `nmap --traceroute --script traceroute-geolocation`, and this is a great tool ! I can see that requests to time-based.snapshots.deb.tails.boum.org go a long way through Europe. Requests to www.vagrantup.com go through Japan, which seems a bit more direct. Amazingly, requests to google go directly from Vietnam to the States. Which explains why they are still fast when everything else is slow, and which makes me wonder if google has private undersea cables. Anyway, I'm no expert, and I'm not sure how to interpret these results. I have no idea how it will look like when I run the same traceroute tomorrow. So let's get back to Tails. The build process involves downloading a lot of data. Most of it from Tails server, and I think the problem here is just that the connectivity in Vietnam right now is way too bad to handle that. Somehow it always fails sooner or later, it timeouts or something. From my understanding, I can change the Debian mirror used for provisioning the VM. But when it comes to build the Tails iso, I have no choice but to download the packages from the Tails mirror, right ? Same goes for TorBrowser ? Right now I'm working on tweaking the build system, and adding retries here and there, so that the build keeps going and doesn't give up so easily. I think that `apt-cacher-ng` should help me to mitigate the problem, but up to now I destroyed the VM too often to take advantage of it ;) I'll keep trying and let you know how it goes. Cheers ! ---- If you were interested in all this conversation (a bit off-topic), you might find the following links interesting: http://www.submarinecablemap.com https://www.citypassguide.com/en/travel/ho-chi-minh-city/daily/news/neverending-story-vietnam-and-the-undersea-internet-cable-ruptures _______________________________________________ Tails-dev mailing list [email protected] https://mailman.boum.org/listinfo/tails-dev To unsubscribe from this list, send an empty email to [email protected].
