webui: send stderr from webui-desktop to a webui-desktop.log file

[KKoukiou]

Previously the error logs were swallowed.

[KKoukiou]

@jkonecny12 @VladimirSlavik is there a better place to send these to?

[VladimirSlavik]

Thanks! I think this is a good destination.

Please add the file also to the list in exception.py, search for def initExceptionHandling(anaconda): and the rest is self-explanatory.

[KKoukiou]

@VladimirSlavik I just realized that if firefix process exits with non 0 exit code, we will get the logs now correctly - but without inst.nokill the machine will shutdown. This is different issue than not getting the logs, but still we are not there yet for a good user experience if firefox crashes.

[M4rtinK]

@VladimirSlavik I just realized that if firefix process exits with non 0 exit code, we will get the logs now correctly - but without inst.nokill the machine will shutdown. This is different issue than not getting the logs, but still we are not there yet for a good user experience if firefox crashes.

Yeah, this is a known issues that we need to fix - basically, due to how Anaconda used to be built, the UI process was considered the main process & shutdown was initiated when it exits. This made sense for the old monolithic single process Anaconda, made much less sense for the modular Anaconda with separate frontend/backend and is totally insane right now when Firefox became the main process!

So what needs to happen is either replace the main process with something sane - like a script or some simple DBus module that we can start and then tell (over DBus/kill via PID ?) to terminate when needed. Alternatively we can take a look at the whole "main process" concept and do it all somehow differently.

[M4rtinK]

@jkonecny12 @VladimirSlavik is there a better place to send these to?

My suggestion would be to also forward them to Journal if possible (and if the messages are not already going there). That makes it much easier to compare with other events happening at the same time. Its also more likely we will get the Journal/syslog dump when debugging user issues than the other files, especially if this is a new log file that might not be known to the various log grabbing tools/filters.

[KKoukiou]

@M4rtinK do you have some expectation how I should connect the webui-desktop script's output to the journal? Using systemd-cat with the script? And if yes, what identifier should I use? anaconda?

[M4rtinK]

@M4rtinK do you have some expectation how I should connect the webui-desktop script's output to the journal? Using systemd-cat with the script? And if yes, what identifier should I use? anaconda?

I just checked how we do it in the Initial Setup startup script and we do use systemd-cat:

echo "Starting Initial Setup GUI" | systemd-cat -t initial-setup -p 6

(https://github.com/rhinstaller/initial-setup/blob/master/scripts/run-initial-setup#L21)

This has been in use for years by now, so should be fine to use here as well. As for the identifier I guess we can just use "anaconda" as its Anaconda related and we don't expect other users uses of this script ?

[KKoukiou]

@M4rtinK since we are going to send the stderr to the journal I don't see the purpose of creating a seperate file.

Here is an illustration how the output looks in the journal (see prefixedf usr/lib/webui-desktop)

Note: I removed firefox before starting the WebUI to reproduce this issue.

[VladimirSlavik]

Thank you, even better. Dumping to journal is really the better choice, as one does not have to hunt for all the logs.

[M4rtinK]

@M4rtinK since we are going to send the stderr to the journal I don't see the purpose of creating a seperate file.

Here is an illustration how the output looks in the journal (see prefixedf usr/lib/webui-desktop)

Agreed with just logging to Journal.

Also this looks very good & useful. Already a couple times in the past we had the startup script or Firefox crashing ant there was just nothing visible in the Journal. :P

This might also very well help me during the ongoing debugging of Halflines no-root Firefox PR. :)

[M4rtinK]

Looks good to me as well, thanks! :)

[KKoukiou]

/kickstart-test --waive webui only