[graphical gui] Whonix Setup Wizard / Anon Connection Wizard - Technical Discussion

Addendum above: Actually… My mistake. It happened while by mistake starting acw in anon-whonix-dev.

It should not be installed there by default anyhow which is my bug.

Nonetheless, acw should not crash in such situations. It is most likely happening due to filtered (cpfpy) Tor control port access.

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Happening because anon-connection-wizard is a dependency of whonix-setup-wizard which get installed in the workstation as well.

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/etc/torrc.d/torrc.examples won’t fly. Tor parses it and errors out.

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Please review.

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Do we have a way to fix this?

Maybe not declare anon-connection-wizard as a dependency of whonix-setup-wizard? Both of them will be installed by default in Whonix 14 anyway, therefore, it is really rare that anon-connection-wizard does not exist when using whonox-setup-wizard.

Therefore, shall we only put torrc.example in /etc/tor directory instead?

Also, I find that Tor will also parse filename~, which is a backup created by some editor. Problem with that is it is too hard to realize for a user. Users think they have changed the Tor settings but actually not, they may result in using the old settings.

Shall I do a proposal to TPO to strictly parse .torrc files only?

iry:

Do we have a way to fix this?

Yes. Otherwise confuses workstation users.

Maybe not declare anon-connection-wizard as a dependency of whonix-setup-wizard? Both of them will be installed by default in Whonix 14 anyway, therefore, it is really rare that anon-connection-wizard does not exist when using whonox-setup-wizard.

Sorted in Whonix 14. Removed dependency and added to anon-meta-packages.

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iry:

Therefore, shall we only put torrc.example in /etc/tor directory
instead?

Sorted. See anon-gw-anonymizer-config package.

Also, I find that Tor will also parse filename~, which is a backup
created by some editor. Problem with that is it is too hard to
realize for a user. Users think they have changed the Tor settings
but actually not, they may result in using the old settings.

Shall I do a proposal to TPO to strictly parse .torrc files only?

Yes, please. That seems more consistent. They also wouldn’t want to
parse files ending ‘.dpkg-old’ (not uncommon…).

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Patrick Schleizer:>> Please review.>>
add new lines at the end · Kicksecure/anon-connection-wizard@b1b5c50 · GitHub>

Thank you so much for your help, Patrick!

I did a small fix:

It can not be reproduced when starting Tor with command: tor rather than systemd.

I will do a further investigation on it.

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All the try/except blocks could use a catch-all exception at the end to handle unforeseen issues causing crashes.

except:
    print "Unexpected error:", sys.exc_info()[0]

(Not just print to console, also showing the error in the gui window to make debugging easier. Initially first perhaps verbatim, later perhaps with a “debugging information” drop-down button.)

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https://github.com/Whonix/whonix-setup-wizard/pull/4

  1. replace connection page with anon-connection-wizard
  2. Remove FinishPage
  3. Remove unused variables and logics
  4. Avoid showing up empty page
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Currently, there are three options use in whonix-setup-wizard: setup, repository, locale_settings.

Shall we run whonixcheck after the GUI configurations for each option? Specifically, does it make sense to run whonixcheck even after user simply change locale_settings?

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TODO for whonix-setup-wizard:

  1. better man and help page
  2. autocompletion for different command line arguments
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For long term, separate locale_settings into a standalone application.

( Hi @troubadour ! Are you interested in implementing this?! )

This may be good for Whonix internationalization in the future.

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iry:

Currently, there are three options use in whonix-setup-wizard: setup, repository, locale_settings.

Shall we run whonixcheck after the GUI configurations for each option?

No. Only useful after setup.

Any maybe after repository? (Due to whonixcheck apt-get update check?)

Specifically, does it make sense to run whonixcheck even after user simply change locale_settings?

I don’t see how this makes sense.

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It looks like anon-connection-wizard is broken in the last Whonix update.
At line 1456, there is a f.write('\n') which crash the script when pressing the Next button.

Yes, why not. But this might be really long term.

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Possible Whonix 14 blocker:

After https://github.com/Whonix/whonix-setup-wizard/pull/4 do we now effectively auto start whonixcheck unconditionally at first boot through whonix-setup-wizard?

  • This very very much unwanted by Qubes for Whonix-Workstation by Joanna. (Too many popups.)
  • Also in Non-Qubes-Whonix we shouldn’t introduce autostart of whonixcheck in Whonix-Workstation through whonix-setup-wizard (wsw).

Minor:

https://github.com/Whonix/whonix-setup-wizard/commit/497c4aaa3f438fedf1778e10aa70a4fc4c5f75b3

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from whonix_setup_wizard.tor_status import tor_status is a bug.

Untested fix.

https://github.com/Whonix/whonix-setup-wizard/commit/d61cbd76eb17c74011e41d24608ca09a2b5543dd

Please review. This may or may not also be the cause of not auto-starting acw on gateway at first boot.