"Unable to contact provider AirVPN to obtain bootstrap information" 2 nights in a row

[$|$C0 1]

I have been testing Eddie for a few weeks now on a Win 7 Pro system.

Other than high ping times (another issue) in the early morning hours yesterday and today Eddie stopped and waited for a manual action. As a result, all my programs stopped communicating until I clicked on the alert popup dialogue when I returned to the computer. This system's primary function is serving files. I run 3 different p2p apps on it 24/7 in addition to my occasional browsing and email.

I do not know what triggers the bootstrap failure. I do know that my ISP often fails for 10-20 minutes, usually in the wee hours of the morning. If that is triggering it, why would Eddie keep checking and reconnect when ISP internet connection resumes?

[OpenSourcerer 1441]

The message makes sense if the downtimes are 10-20 minutes long. Eddie tries to connect to all hardcoded bootstrap servers and shows you this message when the list is exhausted. In normal cases this would mean that all of the bootstrap servers are blocked, and the message gives you the opportunity to enter another, possibly one that is not blocked. In your case it makes little sense because your internet connection is not there in the first place.

[$|$C0 1]

I am assuming it was a temporary glitch with my ISP. But that is just a guess. This is the first time I have seen that in the 3 weeks I have been testing.

I would think that Eddie should try again automatically each 15-30? minutes when this happens.

[OpenSourcerer 1441]

8 hours ago, $|$C0 said:

I would think that Eddie should try again automatically each 15-30? minutes when this happens.

It makes little sense for Eddie to retry connecting if all servers are blocked. It does make sense if one sees them more generally as unreachable. Maybe it is a good feature request, after all.

[$|$C0 1]

My ISP shows no history of blocking if that is what is indicated. And I am thinking my assumption that this was triggered by an uplink failure might not be well founded.

New to this, I am not familiar with the process and function.

Because of the other issue I reported 3 weeks ago, which I have not been able to replicate since, I decided to go back to basics. I reset Eddie to default mode about 10 days ago and noticed changes. I went to "worst case" testing, Wifi instead of ethernet cable, and unlimited UL to max out ISP assigned capacity. The ping time was high but spikes were eliminated. A Paradox.

Then these multi-hour disconnects started. It happened again last night about midnight. But this time it seemed to resume without manual intervention. Befuddled.

Again, not understanding the function of bootstrapping, much less the import of failure, it made me think about the servers. After resetting to default, I had whitelisted about a dozen servers in 3 or 4 countries. But I had done that a week to 10 days ago. Could that relate to this bootstrap failure thing? Today I wiped white list and black list to test.

Any suggestions on what else to try?

 

[OpenSourcerer 1441]

19 hours ago, $|$C0 said:

My ISP shows no history of blocking if that is what is indicated.

No, that bootstrap failed message is there because of cases where AirVPN bootstrap servers are blocked. You get the chance to enter one that is not publically known and so to circumvent such a block. But if there is no internet connection at all, the message makes little sense. A "trump" bootstrap server will still be unreachable.
 

19 hours ago, $|$C0 said:

Then these multi-hour disconnects started. It happened again last night about midnight. But this time it seemed to resume without manual intervention. Befuddled.

Neither of us seems to have a clue about these disconnects. It makes all this quite difficult to troubleshoot, actually.
 

19 hours ago, $|$C0 said:

Again, not understanding the function of bootstrapping, much less the import of failure, it made me think about the servers. After resetting to default, I had whitelisted about a dozen servers in 3 or 4 countries. But I had done that a week to 10 days ago. Could that relate to this bootstrap failure thing? Today I wiped white list and black list to test.

Eddie pulls the server list from bootstrap servers. This is how it knows which servers are there and what their (load) status is. The latency is then added and updated using local ping.
 

19 hours ago, $|$C0 said:

Any suggestions on what else to try?

Not really; it seems to boil down to finding out what these disconnects are all about.

[impbb 1]

On 3/13/2022 at 11:13 AM, OpenSourcerer said:

No, that bootstrap failed message is there because of cases where AirVPN bootstrap servers are blocked. You get the chance to enter one that is not publically known and so to circumvent such a block. But if there is no internet connection at all, the message makes little sense. A "trump" bootstrap server will still be unreachable.
 
Neither of us seems to have a clue about these disconnects. It makes all this quite difficult to troubleshoot, actually.
 
Eddie pulls the server list from bootstrap servers. This is how it knows which servers are there and what their (load) status is. The latency is then added and updated using local ping.
 
Not really; it seems to boil down to finding out what these disconnects are all about.

Sorry to ressurect this thread in orderto leverage the previous content, I have the same issue from my ISP provider that disconnects every day between 2:10 and 2:20 for about 2-3 minutes. They called in the past this as "maintenance routine" (do you have any second thoughts about it and could you disclose if you know better ?) and normally I tend(ed) to trust them even though it's in France and authorities have sweeping powers over internet (the fact that AirVPN didn't provide servers for France was actually one of my main criteria to subscribe it, as this proved AirVPN knew its stuff :-) ). But Free.fr ISP is/was know to be pro-"geek" and free internet  (within the local law of course) despite that this obviously disrupts nightly downloads. 
Anyway my main problem is that every morning that I leave the VPN on I get this message, but the real PITA is, as I have a Mac, that when I try to reconnect I systematically get a beach ball and the only solution AFICT is to reboot. Then everything gets back to normal. So it seems indeed that AirVPN won't try to reconnect and somehow it's stuck in this "bootstrap server" wait. For me a simple reconnection try with say 5 minutes timeout would be more than enough. 

[OpenSourcerer 1441]

Mr. impbb, please open your own thread, providing a description of your problem, logs (system report in case of Eddie), what you tried already, etc. If you think an issue you found in the forums seems similar, link to it; don't barge in here and declare "same issue". It's not the same; for starters, you've likely got another setup, so even if an error message is the same the cause is usually different.
Thank you.

[impbb 1]

On 9/30/2023 at 1:46 PM, OpenSourcerer said:

Mr. impbb, please open your own thread, providing a description of your problem, logs (system report in case of Eddie), what you tried already, etc. If you think an issue you found in the forums seems similar, link to it; don't barge in here and declare "same issue". It's not the same; for starters, you've likely got another setup, so even if an error message is the same the cause is usually different.
Thank you.

Mr. moderator, thank you a lot for your reasoned approach. I was indeed as explained trying to leverage on what seemed to be a simple issue for a quick solution but i does look that the message is actually quite pervasive and that the ultimate issue is not the message as there is even a option to dismiss it but some timeout issue on downed servers.  I'll try first to open a ticket with AirVpn support and see what they reply. Otherwise I'll open a thread if the issue seems futher more complex. Regards.

[impbb 1]

I'm sorry again to add a (last one, promised) post to this thread, always with the same (good) intention of not restarting from scratch, just to inform that I did not have to contact AirVPN support at all, as before that I started noticing the issue had disappeared as the overnight connection would stand, so either a good soul (opensourcerer ?) modified Eddie (though I don't recall having updated it) or someone at AirVPN took notice as this concerns a big (and, at least in the past, geek-friendly and free internet supporter) provider in France and found a way to maintain the connection or somehow tell Eddie so during the nightly 2-3 minute "maintenance" shutdown around 2:15 AM. Thanks and best regards.