0.16 crashes on startup (OS X)

[Szabolcs]

I used to have Stellarium 0.15.1, which worked fine. After upgrading to 0.16, it crashes on startup. The splash screen does appear, but before the main window can be shown, the program crashes.

I tried deleting ~/Library/Application Support/Stellarium, but it did not help.

I have a 2014 MacBook Pro with dual graphics (Intel Iris Pro & NVIDIA GeForce GT 750M). OS: macOS Sierra 10.12.6.

[gzotti (georg-zotti)]

What does Stellarium's own logfile say? (Not this Apple crashlog.)

[Szabolcs (szhorvat)]

Is this the file you need?

[gzotti (georg-zotti)]

Yes, but it shows no issues I can see. Can you try current beta?

[Szabolcs (szhorvat)]

I tested all versions since 15.0, including the beta, and all of them crash.

This means that I was wrong when I said that 0.15.1 worked fine. It must be some other change on my system that triggered the problem. It was a few months ago that I last used 0.15.1 (when it worked fine), and there were several 10.12.x OS updates since then.

Could you tell me how to restore Stellarium to a pristine state? Is it sufficient to remove ~/Library/Application Support/Stellarium, or are there other files I should delete too?

[Alexander Wolf (alexwolf)]

Nope, deleting ~/Library/Application Support/Stellarium should be enough for remove all user data.

I see from the first log that Stellarium was crashed because he got a unpredictable data on early stage of running. It's very strange, but possible this failure was caused by switching between graphics cards. Could you check it?

[Szabolcs (szhorvat)]

I use the utility gfxCardStatus, which makes it possible to manually switch between the graphics cards (and see which one is in use at a certain time). Using this utility, I disabled switching and tried starting Stellarium both with the Intel and the NVIDIA cards. It crashes in both instances.

In each case I removed the user data before startup.

Perhaps I should mention that each time I get a popup window with this text:

"The last time you opened Stellarium, it unexpectedly quit while reopening windows. Do you want to try to reopen its windows again?"

This appears together with the splash screen and offers two choices: "Don't Reopen" and "Reopen". I always choose "Don't Reopen" (but I tried that it crashes with Reopen as well). If Stellarium really does not store user data anywhere else, I assume that this window is shown by the OS itself (not Stellarium), and that the OS itself keeps track of the last crash.

I attached another log.

[Szabolcs (szhorvat)]

Was anyone able to reproduce this problem?

Is there anyone who tested Stellarium on OS X 10.12.6 and it works without crashes?

[Alexander Wolf (alexwolf)]

No crashes on macOS. For example I cannot reproduce the issue.

[Szabolcs (szhorvat)]

Is there anything I can do to debug this? I quite miss this program ...

[Alexander Wolf (alexwolf)]

Could you try latest beta?

[Szabolcs (szhorvat)]

I tried 0.90.0.9732, released Aug 6th.

It does NOT crash.

You found the cause of the crash then?

[Szabolcs (szhorvat)]

I just tried a second time, and it crashed again, every single time I tried.

Thinking about what was different from my earlier test, I realized that I was using a different network connection.

It turns out that if I disable WiFi, Stellarium works fine. If I enable it, it crashes.

[Szabolcs (szhorvat)]

Further update:

Stellarium crashes because I am using the DNS blocker pi-hole (see https://pi-hole.net/) and in its default configuration it is blocking freegeoip.net (which Stellarium tries to access).

Having figured this out, I can now easily fix this by whitelisting this domain.

However, this still looks like a bug. Stellarium should not just crash if this service does not work or returns bad data.

[Alexander Wolf (alexwolf)]

Please check version 0.90.0.9744

[Szabolcs (szhorvat)]

I cannot test at this time, but I will get back to you in about 10 days.

[Szabolcs (szhorvat)]

@alexwolf, I just tested 0.90.0.9767 (the latest beta at the moment) and the crash is still present. Should I test .9744 instead?

[Alexander Wolf (alexwolf)]

Bad news. Could you write firewall rule for blocking freegeoip.net host?

[Szabolcs (szhorvat)]

I am sorry for not responding. I wasn't sure how to block a single domain using OS X's firewall, and after a while, I gave up. Could you please give me some pointers on this?

How pi-hole works is that it returns its own IP for blocked domains (I think! I'm not very familiar with DNS) and it just shows a page where I can whitelist the domain if I want to. Of course, this does not work for HTTPS sites like freegeoip.net. For those, I just get a "refused to connect" error in the browser.

It could be that when Stellarium tries to contact freegeoip.net, it does receive a response, but that response doesn't conform to its expectations, and therefore it crashes.

[jeshansen (jeshansen)]

Just adding freegeoip.net to pi.hole's whitelist is enough to stop the crash from happening for me. In your browser open http://pi.hole/admin/list.php?l=white and add freegeoip.net. After a few seconds the list updates, and you are now likely to be able to start Stellarium without crashes.

[Szabolcs (szhorvat)]

I know, I did in fact say that in #14.

[Alexander Wolf (alexwolf)]

Stellarium 0.90.0.9808 (0.16.1RC2) is available for testing.

[Szabolcs (szhorvat)]

I can confirm that this version does not crash.