Hello! My Tor connection in sys-whonix rarely finishes bootstrapping successfully (but Tor Browser works every time from another system on the same network, so it’s not a bridge issue, and it does succeed occasionally). What % it gets stuck at varies; it usually hangs at 95% but sometimes lower.
In Nyx, I see many events of the form
[WARN] 17 connections have failed
and
[WARN] 5 connections have died in state handshaking (TLS) with SSL SSLv3/TLS write client hello in HANDSHAKE
Watching the sdwdate log, I see that it gets stuck in a loop running anondate-set. Here is the relevant output:
____ ### START: ### /usr/sbin/anondate-set
____ INFO: Status file '/run/sdwdate/tor_certificate_lifetime_set' does not yet exist.
____ INFO: Running anondate-get...
______ ### START: ### /usr/sbin/anondate-get
____ INFO: anondate-get returned Tor consensus middle range time or minimum time.
____ INFO: The 'anondate-get' time_result is earlier than the current system time, ok. Note setting clock backwards.
____ ### END: ### Exiting with exit_code '3' indicating 'Setting time using anondate either not possible or not required.'
Running date on my Whonix gateway VM displays the correct time (to within a few seconds) with UTC time zone.
Usually it hangs at 25% for me. The only solution is to continually rebuild the connection every time I loose network connectivity.
Maybe it’s related to sdwdate hanging.
I’ve had these problems for a few weeks, all at the same time. It affects activities like Qubes updates, which often hangs and fails. Or simply network connectivity ends while browsing.
Every once in awhile I’ll check the sdwdate icon and it’s not fully completed.
Oh and there’s also the error each time I close Tor, “Failed to execute whonix.SdwdateStatus (from sys.whonix to dispXXXX)”. I saw the solution for this but I’m hesitant to do it because I don’t understand why one qube would communicate with another or if this is a risk.
It may all be related to Qubes 4.1 because I recently installed it.
Patrick, thank you for writing that article. Unfortunately, sdwdate is still failing. (I am not saying it’s sdwdate’s fault, but this is how the problem presents itself.)
The nature of the problem has changed slightly since the last update (via Qube Manager) of the whonix-gw-16 template. Now, Tor successfully connects (it usually sticks at 95% for ~10 minutes then succeeds), but then the sdwdate log says:
sdwdate - ERROR - General Timeout Error. Internet connection might be down.
and the sdwdate-gui icon changes to a closed lock with an “X” in the middle.
All my other VMs can access the internet (via sys-firewall), and I have tried changing the sys-whonix NetVM to sys-net as your article suggested - but that had no effect on this behavior.
What else would you suggest I do to troubleshoot this problem? I am running Qubes 4.1.