#5 Consistently crashes when network not present

[John Owens]

OS X 10.6.newest. This problem was both on 1.1.11 and 1.1.13.

When I lose network connectivity, MacBiff consistently crashes with errors like:

2/23/10 5:51:18 PM [0x0-0x3bd3bd].org.forkit.MacBiff[88963] ALERT: [comms.c:151] read: Connection reset by peer
2/23/10 5:51:18 PM com.apple.launchd.peruser.501[472] ([0x0-0x3bd3bd].org.forkit.MacBiff[88963]) Exited abnormally: Broken pipe

Anything I can do to help track it down?

[lhagan]

This might be an explanation for the occasional crashes I've experienced, although I'm pretty sure that it doesn't always crash when I lose my network connection. I'll see if I can replicate the failure tonight. If it is directly related to network connectivity, it should be as simple as adding some extra error handling somewhere.

In the meantime, you could use Peter Borg's Lingon (lingon.sourceforge.net) to create a launchd service that will restart MacBiff when it crashes. Make sure to check the "Keep running no matter what happens" box. Let me know if these instructions don't make any sense. This isn't an elegant solution, but will do the trick.

[Branden Moore]

Hi John,

Can you describe how you are losing network connectivity so that we may attempt to reproduce the error you're seeing?

Also, can you run MacBiff from a Terminal.app console session? That might give a little bit more output to help us track down where we aren't handling the loss of connectivity appropriately.

Thanks, and I'm sorry you're having difficulties.

- Branden

[John Owens]

OK, I ran it from the command line. It immediately spit out the first line. Then I turned off AirPort and manually checked email and it died with the second line:

classico 9906$ /Applications/MacBiff.app/Contents/MacOS/MacBiff
ALERT: [comms_remote.c:78] Connecting, but already comms_conn.
ALERT: [comms.c:151] read: Connection reset by peer

If it makes any difference, it's connecting through a localhost port (998) that tunnels through stunnel to a remote server. Here's the stunnel conf:

[imap-campus]
accept = 998
connect = mail.myuniversity.edu:993

Maybe the stunnel thing makes it weird, don't know, but in any case, MacBiff shouldn't crash.

[Amir Caspi]

This remains a problem with OS X 10.6.8 and MacBiff 1.1.15. I didn't used to get crashes until the past month or so, which is when I started using VPN a lot... except that MacBiff crashes apparently randomly, and does not seem to be tied to my VPN usage whatsoever. So, I'm not sure what's causing it. The errors in the console are the same as posted in the original report.