stale processes and message errors with early 0.9.x releases

[sarnold]

Mainly seen on Bionic, along with issues related to stunnel and openssl versions. This leaves one or more instances of fpnd.py still running after stopping and starting resulting in a small flood of announce/config messages.

Fixed in https://github.com/freepn/fpnd/releases/tag/0.9.5

So the first thing to do is make sure you have the latest packages; this should include upgrades to both python3-fpnd and stunnel4. So, open a terminal and do:

$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get upgrade

As of today you should end up with these new versions:

$ dpkg -l python3-fpnd
ii  python3-fpnd   0.9.5-0   <= important part
$ dpkg -l stunnel4
ii  stunnel4       3:5.55-2   <= important part

Now stop the stunnel service; it will start again when you start the fpnd service:

$ sudo systemctl stop stunnel4.service

Then stop the fpnd service and check for any stale processes; after opening a terminal window:

$ sudo systemctl stop fpnd.service
$ ps ax | grep py

If you see fpnd.py in the output, you'll need to manually kill those processes before starting the service again:

$ ps ax | grep py
  747 ?        Ssl    0:00 /usr/bin/python3 /usr/bin/networkd-dispatcher --run-startup-triggers
 1726 ?        Sl     0:02 /usr/bin/python3 /usr/share/system-config-printer/applet.py
17701 ?        Sl     0:02 /usr/bin/python3 /usr/share/system-config-printer/applet.py
26810 ?        Sl     0:00 /usr/bin/python3 /usr/lib/fpnd/fpnd.py start
26847 pts/2    S+     0:00 grep --color=auto py

Note the process ID 26810 and kill it:

$ sudo kill 26810

It might be stubborn, so check again and use -s 9 if it ignores the first kill:

$ sudo kill -s 9 26810

Now you should at least get a clean startup, but there may still be a lot of bad nodes in use until more people upgrade...