Automatic Bug Reporting

Overview

Automatic bug reporting is a feature introduced in MCTowns v2.1.0 and discontinued in 2.4.0. If an unhandled exception occurs (the kind of error that would normally print a stack trace to your logs), it will instead use TCP/IP to transfer a record of what happened over the network to a server where I can collect them.

If you want some feedback about a bug report, feel free to open a ticket in the BukkitDev issue tracker, and just mention that your bug was automatically report. You should still describe what you were doing when the bug occurred. If you can post what your public IP was when the bug occurred, that will make figuring out which bug report is yours much easier.

I strongly suggest that you not modify these settings. Getting reliable bug reports is crucial to making MCTowns a better plugin. No private data is collected; you can view the information that will be collected below.

Report Contents

Each report contains:

• Your IP address
• CB version you're running
• MCTowns version you're running
• MCTowns config options
• Error message
• JRE Vendor
• JRE version
• OS name
• OS version
• OS architecture
• call stack of the exception

Configuration

There are two relevant config options: bugReportHostname = services.jmhertlein.net and port = 9001

bugReportHostname and port are the hostname and port of the server that the reporting daemon will be running on. services.jmhertlein.net and 9001 are the defaults, and are where my server will be listening for reports. So, if you want your reports to get to me, leave them as-is and configure your firewall appropriately. If you want to disable automatic bug reporting, set the hostname to 0 (numeric zero). Do not leave it blank.

Usage

it is not necessary to run your own bug reporting daemon. The defaults will report bugs to me automatically. If you're not sure how to use this feature or do not know if you need/want to use it, do not change the defaults, stop reading now, and go do something else.

To run your own bug reporting daemon (perhaps you have some sort of in-house dev team that handles issues like this?), you will need to build the daemon program from source.

First, use Git to clone the repository:

git clone https://github.com/jmhertlein/BugReportReceiverDaemon.git

Now, use Maven to compile it:

cd <name of dir created by git-clone>
mvn package

A jar will be created in the target directory. Copy this somewhere safe and execute it with

java -jar <filename of jar>

To update to a newer version of the daemon, simply cd into the directory git-clone made and run

git pull
mvn clean package

And voila, you have an updated jar.

If you're in a UNIX-like environment, I would recommend running it in a GNU screen, like so:

$screen -S mctbrd java -jar EverCoreUtils.jar

Google "GNU screen" or type "man screen" for more information on how to use screen.

This starts the daemon in interactive mode. A help menu will be printed. Type "help" for more information.

If you're running your own daemon, remember to change MCTowns' config file to point at your server.