I support a Rails 4 app used for remote project reporting. One of the team insists that she used the tool on several occasions to report her data, double-checked it to ensure it had been entered properly, then later discovered it was all gone. I found evidence of her authentication (Devise gem) in the production logs, but no trace of her reporting activity--not even the GET requests that would be necessary to begin her work.
Is it even possible for Rails to suppress logging events in this manner, when they are working for every other user?
If it is not possible, does it suggest that the claim is unreliable? (trust me, I'm not pre-assuming this)
Unfortunately, the user is no longer involved in the project and is not responding to requests. Also, the absence of necessary POST events is borne out by a client-facing logging feature as well.
Rails logs all requests the moment a GET hits the server, before authentication happens. It is most improbable that logged requests by a single user can be suppressed, unless the default middleware stack is modified.
I'd go with Occam's Razor.
Related
I have a rails api using devise-token-auth. Recently I was on really spotty/slow Wifi and I noticed I was getting 401's from my app. My theory is that the refreshing auth token is either being lost and delayed by the bad network. That being said, I'm having a hard time reproducing the bug itself.
Three primary questions:
Could a spotty Wifi/network connection lead to 401s, due to loss or delay of the new auth-token. And if this is the case, is there a way to recover without needing the user to log back in.
How to reproduce such an environment, so I can debug this scenario.
I was able to reproduce it by delaying the server response using a debugger. In my case, this happens when I enable change_headers_on_each_request config, so when the response which carries the new tokens fails the next responses throw 401 code.
I recently sent an issue to the gem explaining this and asking how can I handle this situation on the frontend.
I have an application hosted on Amazon EC2 on a Ubuntu machine, written in Ruby (on Rails), deployed with Capistrano and running on Nginx.
Last friday one module of my application has crashed and nobody in the company noticed until this morning. We spent some money with Facebook and Google ads and received a few hundreds of visits, but nobody created an account due to this bug.
I wonder if this configuration is saving the HTTP requests and its bodies somewhere in a log file. But we didnt explicitly set it, so it would only happen if any of these technologies do it by default.
Do you know whether there is such log or not?
Nope, that wouldn't be anywhere in a usable form (I'm inferring you want to try to create the accounts from request bodies in log files). You'll have the requests themselves in your nginx logs, and the rails logs will contain more info about the request, but as a matter of security, by default, any sensitive information (e.g. passwords) would be scrubbed from them. You may still be able to get some info from them.
To answer your question a little more specifically, the usual place for these logs on your system would be:
/var/log/nginx/
/path/to/your/rails/app/log/production.log
On a separate note, I would recommend looking into an error reporting service like Honeybadger, Airbrake, Raygun, Appsignal, or others so that you don't have silent failures like this moving forward.
I have an MVC 4 app and am using the default authentication provider. I'm not using persistent cookies.
I don't have any problems in development but when hosted at HostGator, I SOMETIMES get logged off when I try to create a new item (HTTP POST). When this happens, I end up at the log on page like I wasn't authenticated.
HostGator does NOT have the app on multiple web servers so I'm thinking I shouldn't have to worry about machinekey stuff. Am I wrong?
When this happens, I just log in again and create the item again and it will succeed. Once this happens, I can't recreate the issue. I try reopening the browser and even different browsers but creating items will always work. It only seems to happen again if I try much later.
Some additional info, the timeout is set to 2880 (the default for an MVC project), which I know is long but I can't see how it would be related. Still, thought I'd mention it.
So I can't look at IIS logs or event viewer to get any idea what could be happening but I can add more logging to the app. Can anyone provide ideas for what to check or what logging to add to diagnose?
Thanks
EDIT
I realized that I could get to the IIS logs so I compared the POST that succeeded and the one that failed and immediately noticed something.
When I first did the GET to load the Item/Create page/view, the cs-username was populated but when I did the POST to create the item, it was gone. I can see that when I logged in again and was able to successfully create the item, that POST did have the cs-username populated.
Why would it disappear between the GET and the POST? There was a 7 minute delay from the GET to the POST but I can see I logged on 1 minute before the GET so the session was only 8 minutes old when the post happened. I've double checked that I don't have sessionstate explicitly configured so the default should be 20 minutes. I feel like I'm onto something but not sure exactly what.
Might be worth adding Glimpse, although running that on deployed code is kinda risky. It would have the benefit, though, of letting you see what's actually happening on the server. I've never used HostGator, so I can't say for certain, but if they recycle app pools aggressively, that would invalid your login, and explain why the logoff seems to happen randomly.
I'm having a problem with a MVC (1.0) app that I can't figure out at all. There's two versions of the site (live and UAT) hosted on the same server. For each version of the site, the same code is shared by multiple organisations who each have their own database (MSSQL2005) and a separate web site in IIS (7.5) (pointed to the same code).
The UAT site has an update to the code and the database that is waiting to be deployed to the live site.
One of the customers ("customer A") is getting an error "104: Connection reset by peer" when they try to log in to the UAT site. They can see the login page but when they submit their login details the connection seems to be timing out (the requests seem to take ~130s to complete).
Customer A can log in fine to the live site. The other customers don't have a problem logging into the UAT site or the live site. If I try to log in as customer A, using their login details, it all works fine from within our network, and also from outside our network.
Customer A seems to be using squid as a proxy.
I can't think what the problem could be, and I've run out of ideas of things to test. The fact that I can log in as the customer fine and other customers don't have any issues seems to eliminate the code and database as problems.
What other things could I do to try and isolate the problem?
By dumping out the request data I was able to work out that something (I'm guessing the proxy) was removing the form values from the request. This obviously meant the app didn't work properly.
However, it seems whatever was removing the form data was leaving content-length unchanged, which would explain why the client was timing out waiting for more data and the server thought it was finished.
By using https instead of http (which we were going to do anyway), the request tampering seem to have stopped.
I am completely new to ruby and I inherited a ruby system for a product catalogue. Most of my users are able to view everything as they should but overseas users (specifically Mexico) cannot contact the server once logged in. They are an active user. I'm sorry I cannot be more specific, and the system is private so I cannot grant access.
Has anyone had any issues similar to this before? Is it a user-end issue or a system error?
Speaking as somebody who regularly ends up on your user's side of the fence, the number one culprit for this symptom is "Clueless administrator". There are many, many sites which generically block either large blocks of IP space or which geolocate and carve out big portions of the world.
For example, a surprising number of American blogs block Asian countries (including Japan) out of a misplaced effort to avoid DDOS attacks (which actually probably originated in Russia or China but, hey, this species of administrator isn't very good on fine tuning solutions). I have to hop over to my American proxy server to access those sites.
So the first thing I'd do to diagnose your problems is to see whether your Mexican users are making it to the server at all, or whether they're being blocked somewhere earlier (router? firewall? etc). Then, to determine whether the problem is on your end or their end, I'd try to replicate the issue with you proxying your connection through a Mexican proxy and repeating the actions they took to cause the issue.
The fact that they get blocked after logging in could indicate that you have https issues , for example with an HTTPS accelerator installed [1], or it could be that your frontend server is properly serving up the static content but doing the checking on dynamic requests only.
[1] We've seen some really weird bugs at work caused by a malfunctioning HTTPS accelerator.
If it's working for everyone else then it would appear that the problem is not with Ruby or Rails working, since they are...
My first thought would be to check for a network issue: are the Mexican users all behind the same proxy server and/or firewall?
Is login handled within the Rails application or via some other resource? Can you see any evidence that requests from Mexican users are reaching your web server at all?
Login is handled by the rails app. Am currently trying to hunt down the logs, taking some time as again I am new to this system.
Cheers guys
Maybe INS is cracking down on cyber-immigration.