I'm not seeing the content I post?

[huu]

• Win10 64 bit, 1803
• v2.0.0-dev.9, build 1902131456.97bf3870

Expected Behavior

If I install Aether, create a new user, post a test post in b/Sandbox, wait 5 hours, close Aether, delete all Aether/AirLabs folders in Appdata, open Aether again, create a new user, wait 2 hours to receive all content, I should see the post I posted in b/Sandbox with the first user.

Actual behavior

I do what I wrote above, but the post I did with the first user is not visible any more after I connected with the new “clean” Aether install and a new user.

Additional Information

I consistently have between 5-10 inbound and outbound connections, so that looks good. Port mapping says “Port mapping status: Mapping failed, router did not accept” though. Is that an issue? @b

[b]

Hey there,

Thanks for reporting back. Let’s check one thing first, which might be the reason. If you go to

C:\Users\[YOUR USERNAME]\AppData\Local\Air Labs\Aether\v0

You should see a folder called addresses, and another called c0. Here are the questions:

1. Do both exist?
2. When you go into addresses, is there a file called index.json in it? (It should have 56 or 57 folders and an index.json.
3. Go into c0, do these folders exist? boards, threads, posts, votes, keys, truststates
4. If they do, do each of them have 56~ folders and an index.json?

If you can’t OK all four, you might have encountered a bug I’ve been trying to nail for the past week or so. It only happens on Windows, and it’s weirdly inconsistent.

Let me know — and then we can debug from there.

[huu]

Hi, thanks for getting back to me.

You should see a folder called addresses, and another called c0. Here are the questions:

• Do both exist?

I assume you forgot to mention the “v0” folder, so it’s Aether/v0/addresses and Aether/v0/c0, but yes, those two folders exist.

• When you go into addresses, is there a file called index.json in it? (It should have 56 or 57 folders

No, the “addresses” folder is empty.

• Go into c0 , do these folders exist? boards, threads, posts, votes, keys, truststates

Yes, all those folders do exist.

• If they do, do each of them have 56~ folders and an index.json ?

No, all those folders are empty.

Downloading new content is working fine in Aether, so I do see some stuff posted 4 hours ago etc

[b]

Thanks for confirming — yes, it does appear to be the same issue I am talking about. (And yes, I forgot the v0 part, my apologies)

The weird thing about this bug is that I can’t replicate it myself on my machine. Here are some things I am thinking that might be relevant:

• Do you have antivirus software installed? If so, which one? Does it appear to be doing something to Aether, if you can see its logs? (Not a big deal if there’s no easy way to see its logs)
• Does your computer username (i.e. the [YOUR USERNAME] part above) have a space in it?

An unfortunate side effect of being privacy oriented is that your backend doesn’t send me any logs, so I have no idea when this happens.

I do have one way to debug this, and that would be to connect to your system via TeamViewer if you have it installed (a user support software for remote desktop), reset the app on your computer via remote desktop, and wait for the logs to appear, in about five minutes or so. Though I do realise that might be too much for you. It would be super helpful for me to be able to see it happen live though, since I literally can’t replicate the thing in any way I know, but it seems to be happening to a few folks.

If you’re interested in helping out, send an email to hello@getaether.net and I can send you further instructions to do this.

[huu]

Thanks for confirming — yes, it does appear to be the same issue I am talking about. (And yes, I forgot the v0 part, my apologies)

Not sure if it is related, but Aether once worked for me - so it wasn’t always that it isn’t working. I’ve noticed back then that in the v0 folder there were something like ~5 million files, so I deleted that a week ago or so, it just was too big. I guess it could be that Aether stopped working after I did that? I expected it would just recreate everything in that folder that it needs, especially if I also delete the rest of it in Appdata.

The weird thing about this bug is that I can’t replicate it myself on my machine. Here are some things I am thinking that might be relevant:

• Do you have antivirus software installed? If so, which one? Does it appear to be doing something to Aether, if you can see its logs? (Not a big deal if there’s no easy way to see its logs)

Yes, Avast Free Antivirus with everything enabled, and Malwarebytes, but only for scanning, so all live protection stuff disabled.

The weird thing about this bug is that I can’t replicate it myself on my machine. Here are some things I am thinking that might be relevant:

• Does your computer username (i.e. the [YOUR USERNAME] part above) have a space in it?

No, it does not have any spaces in it. It’s one word.

An unfortunate side effect of being privacy oriented is that your backend doesn’t send me any logs, so I have no idea when this happens.

I do have one way to debug this, and that would be to connect to your system via TeamViewer if you have it installed (a user support software for remote desktop), reset the app on your computer via remote desktop, and wait for the logs to appear, in about five minutes or so. Though I do realise that might be too much for you. It would be super helpful for me to be able to see it happen live though, since I literally can’t replicate the thing in any way I know, but it seems to be happening to a few folks.

I don’t really like having anyone I don’t know well to connect to my PC. Are there any log files that I can upload here to help you see the issue?

[huu]

@b

I’m wondering, if you think a space inside of the username could cause issues, isn’t the folder “Air Labs” also a potential cause for issues? Since when you look at:

C:\Users[YOUR USERNAME]\AppData\Local\Air Labs\Aether\v0

then the “Air Labs” there is the only thing with a space in it’s name.

I guess for being safe you might want to use “AirLabs” instead?

[b]

Yes, Avast Free Antivirus with everything enabled, and Malwarebytes, but only for scanning, so all live protection stuff disabled.

This might be the culprit. All the people that has this problem (so far two, including you, so not a strong dataset, but still) has an antivirus. You have two. You might try whitelisting Aether in both antiviruses and see what happens.

I don’t really like having anyone I don’t know well to connect to my PC. Are there any log files that I can upload here to help you see the issue?

I understand. No, there are no log files, since backend logs aren’t sent, they aren’t collected either.

I’m wondering, if you think a space inside of the username could cause issues, isn’t the folder “Air Labs” also a potential cause for issues? Since when you look at:

Spaces don’t matter, but some versions of Windows do have weirdness in handling space in local user naming only. So the file path having a space or multiple is fine.

[b]

I’ve cut a new release that, small chance, might help.

Can you remove the old version, download this one and install? You need to keep this running for about half an hour for the caches to be generated. Check the caches folder in about 30 minutes, and let me know if they’re still empty.

https://static.getaether.net/Releases/Aether-2.0.0-dev.9/1902181743.15be3edf/win/Aether-Setup-2.0.0-dev.9%2B1902181743.15be3edf.exe

This is a new build of dev.9 for Windows, but this one is now code signed. I’ve just received the Authenticode code signing certificate for Windows, this should reduce the antivirus software freaking out about it, since it’s now trusted by Windows. Worth trying.

[huu]

@b

I have uninstalled Aether and deleted all Aether and Air Labs folders in AppData and then installed the version you linked. I have also whitelisted the Aether install directory and it’s AppData directories in Avast, and disabled Malwarebytes completely.

Unfortunately there is no difference though, after running it for more than an hour, the folders are still empty.

Could you add some optional logging that people can turn on to be able to send you logs that show what’s wrong? To me that would seem like the best way to figure out what’s wrong. If there’s other things I could test, let me know.

[huu]

@b

I did see the update notification for dev10, and I updated Aether to that, roughly 20 hours ago.

After that, it seems the folder stuff started working, there are now a lot of folders in all of the folders you asked about. There’s actually way too many - it’s now a total of 215000 files in the v0 folder. Opening/closing files in windows is really quite a slow operation, regarding performance this looks terrible, so I don’t think it’s very good to write so many files to disk? Is this how it should be? 215000 files after a day of having Aether opened?

Apart from that, I don’t think that Aether is working better now regarding distributing posts though, even with the files being created in the folders - 19 hours ago I posted a test post in b/Sandbox asking if anyone sees it, and I do see 0 upvotes and 0 replies till now.

[b]

Is this how it should be? 215000 files after a day of having Aether opened?

Nope, shut it down. This is the same bug as not seeing any folders — in the old version of the app, this bug manifested itself as too many folders. The new one made it so that if that bug happens, no files would be created, so at least it would not create excessive number of files. But I reverted that trying to fix the connection issues some folks faced (which turned out to be a separate connection issue unrelated to this), so you’re back to the first manifestation of the bug (too many files).

Fundamentally, I need to be able to see your system somehow to figure out exactly why your computer isn’t allowing the index.json to be created. If you’d like to send me logs, there is a way, but it is a long one. I started writing the instructions for it yesterday and I gave up after 10 minutes of typing. If you’d like to help, I can write the directions.

[huu]

Nope, shut it down. This is the same bug as not seeing any folders — in the old version of the app, this bug manifested itself as too many folders. The new one made it so that if that bug happens, no files would be created, so at least it would not create excessive number of files. But I reverted that trying to fix the connection issues some folks faced (which turned out to be a separate connection issue unrelated to this), so you’re back to the first manifestation of the bug (too many files).

Interesting!

Fundamentally, I need to be able to see your system somehow to figure out exactly why your computer isn’t allowing the index.json to be created. If you’d like to send me logs, there is a way, but it is a long one. I started writing the instructions for it yesterday and I gave up after 10 minutes of typing. If you’d like to help, I can write the directions.

I like the concept of Aether, so I want to help you with fixing this issue, even if it means doing some complex steps for 30 minutes Would be nice if you would write the instructions.

[b]

Sounds great, I appreciate the help. I’m currently working on the scalability issue (the connections issue I mentioned) so after I fix those, I’ll come back and write how you can get logs. Should be in a couple days. Thanks!

[Higgsy]

[mod edit: please keep on topic — as a heads up, this comment is factually incorrect on multiple levels]

If I may interject, since many of us are having the same issues, I don’t think the ability to see posts we make is related to connectivity to nodes. There seems to be an overall platform problem on the front and back end, in which data does not fully transmit nor load even when connected to multiple nodes.

Outside of a handful of IT people in San Francisco who can make changes in their network service, all the people I know using aether cannot see their posts outside of their own computers nor are their usernames and accounts visible to others on the network.

This could be more of an issue with routers and networks that are blocking the transmission of data as it could be perceived as a DoS attack. Personally, I don’t have issues using other P2P apps, so there seems to be a coding issue regarding download/transmission of data as all the posts/edits I make are never transmitted to other nodes, and new data is also not transmitted to me after the initial launch, even when I am connected to 10 nodes.

Looking through the comments, it appears this has been an ongoing issue since Dec 2018, as other users have commented on the same thing. We just can’t see our usernames and posts outside of our own computers because the data is simply not transmitting to other nodes.