Armory - Discussion Thread

[dedicatedpoolcom]

After 3 days I still can't get in to my armory wallet, it keeps crashing.  Have I lost all coins?  I've redownloaded the block chain multiple times.  Everytime I try to load it up it takes 20 minutes to resync.

Any help here please??

Can I access the bitcoind daemon without going through armory?

Calm down, load up a vm with no bitcoind so it's in offline mode then extract your private keys

I was smart and did a paper backup a while back.

I installed it on my wife's computer, resynced block chain and restored from paper wallet.  Worked like a charm, thanks

[kentt]

Okay I deleted everything in appdata/armory and added a new wallet "unused hack".  Let that sync.  Everything was peachy.  Stop and started Armory everything worked.
Added my offline wallet.  Crashed. Any Idea how I can fix this?  Or should I just hold tight?

Try that again with a watching only copy of your offline wallet. If that crashes too, send me a copy of your WO wallet and I can isolate the bug.

Okay I'll test again with the WO wallet.  I'll try on a couple other rigs today too.  I'd rather not send my WO wallet for privacy reasons though I really appreciate the offer.

I've imported the WO wallet on 3 computers now with similar results.  On rig 2 I got the wallet imported and scanned but it would crash frequently (with 30 minutes) and now does load without crashing.  On rig 3 I've done a clean install of Ubuntu 12.04, updated and installed bitcoind and qt from the ppa, synced the blockchain and I'm having similar symptoms as rig 2 and 1 now.

I moved back to using 0.88.1 on rig 1 and it hasn't crashed after a few days. 

Would it make sense to try to reimport (from the paper fragments I have) and export the WO wallet and see if that works better or is that unlikely to do anything different?

[QuantumQrack]

Armory runs bitcoind.exe in the background right?  Is there a way to specify armory to run bitcoind.exe with the -server option? 

[goatpig]

I've imported the WO wallet on 3 computers now with similar results.  On rig 2 I got the wallet imported and scanned but it would crash frequently (with 30 minutes) and now does load without crashing.  On rig 3 I've done a clean install of Ubuntu 12.04, updated and installed bitcoind and qt from the ppa, synced the blockchain and I'm having similar symptoms as rig 2 and 1 now.

I moved back to using 0.88.1 on rig 1 and it hasn't crashed after a few days. 

Would it make sense to try to reimport (from the paper fragments I have) and export the WO wallet and see if that works better or is that unlikely to do anything different?

Do you mean this WO is ages old? I thought you had it exported from your recently restored wallets. If it is very old, now I really want to take a look at it.

Someome just recently sent us a WO that crashes Armory. I don't know if its yours but I'll be getting on it soon. I'm not gonna insist to see your WO until I'm done with the current one, however it may be very interesting. If anything don't delete it.

As for your test, you should try with a freshly derivated WO.

[goatpig]

Armory runs bitcoind.exe in the background right?  Is there a way to specify armory to run bitcoind.exe with the -server option? 

bitcoin.conf?

[kentt]

I've imported the WO wallet on 3 computers now with similar results.  On rig 2 I got the wallet imported and scanned but it would crash frequently (with 30 minutes) and now does load without crashing.  On rig 3 I've done a clean install of Ubuntu 12.04, updated and installed bitcoind and qt from the ppa, synced the blockchain and I'm having similar symptoms as rig 2 and 1 now.

I moved back to using 0.88.1 on rig 1 and it hasn't crashed after a few days. 

Would it make sense to try to reimport (from the paper fragments I have) and export the WO wallet and see if that works better or is that unlikely to do anything different?

Do you mean this WO is ages old? I thought you had it exported from your recently restored wallets. If it is very old, now I really want to take a look at it.

Someome just recently sent us a WO that crashes Armory. I don't know if its yours but I'll be getting on it soon. I'm not gonna insist to see your WO until I'm done with the current one, however it may be very interesting. If anything don't delete it.

As for your test, you should try with a freshly derivated WO.

It wasn't me who sent you the WO wallet.  I will try with a freshly exported WO wallet from the backup and update you.  I will keep a backup of the WO wallet that's crashing.

It's not an old wallet.  The first tx I have in there is early Dec. 2013 so I imagine I made it with whatever Armory version was current then.

As an aside, using 0.88.1 is working well right now.

[oakpacific]

Hi, I saw gmaxwell mentioning that the bitcoin-qt's algorithm for finding unspent outputs have a time complexity of O(N^2!), wonder what's the situation with Armory? Just curious, thanks.

[kentt]

I've imported the WO wallet on 3 computers now with similar results.  On rig 2 I got the wallet imported and scanned but it would crash frequently (with 30 minutes) and now does load without crashing.  On rig 3 I've done a clean install of Ubuntu 12.04, updated and installed bitcoind and qt from the ppa, synced the blockchain and I'm having similar symptoms as rig 2 and 1 now.

I moved back to using 0.88.1 on rig 1 and it hasn't crashed after a few days. 

Would it make sense to try to reimport (from the paper fragments I have) and export the WO wallet and see if that works better or is that unlikely to do anything different?

Do you mean this WO is ages old? I thought you had it exported from your recently restored wallets. If it is very old, now I really want to take a look at it.

Someome just recently sent us a WO that crashes Armory. I don't know if its yours but I'll be getting on it soon. I'm not gonna insist to see your WO until I'm done with the current one, however it may be very interesting. If anything don't delete it.

As for your test, you should try with a freshly derivated WO.

It wasn't me who sent you the WO wallet.  I will try with a freshly exported WO wallet from the backup and update you.  I will keep a backup of the WO wallet that's crashing.

It's not an old wallet.  The first tx I have in there is early Dec. 2013 so I imagine I made it with whatever Armory version was current then.

As an aside, using 0.88.1 is working well right now.

After re-export, still crashing. 

[Flanagan]

Hi, used Search in this Armory forum but got no results.

In windows7 an antivirus program detected the following TROJAN:

AppData\Roaming\Armory\databases\levelb_blkdata\035288.sst   marking it as: VBS:Bicolo-IU(Trj)


Has this issue been addressed already ? Is it somthing normal or something abnormal to worry about?

Please let us know, thanks.

Uninstalled Armory, deleted the Armory files, including databases. Reinstalled, synchronized OK. I Ran the antivirus program (Avast) again and AGAIN I got a TROJAN warning as the above, mwith a different SST file this time. The Antivirus program deleted that one too but then Armory crashed with an error warning when trying to Sync again.

Can anyone give me some feedback as to if there are any precedents to this sort of thing ? Should I worry ? Is there anyplace else where this sort of issue has been addressed ?

THANKS

[bitpop]

Hi, used Search in this Armory forum but got no results.

In windows7 an antivirus program detected the following TROJAN:

AppData\Roaming\Armory\databases\levelb_blkdata\035288.sst   marking it as: VBS:Bicolo-IU(Trj)


Has this issue been addressed already ? Is it somthing normal or something abnormal to worry about?

Please let us know, thanks.

Uninstalled Armory, deleted the Armory files, including databases. Reinstalled, synchronized OK. I Ran the antivirus program (Avast) again and AGAIN I got a TROJAN warning as the above, mwith a different SST file this time. The Antivirus program deleted that one too but then Armory crashed with an error warning when trying to Sync again.

Can anyone give me some feedback as to if there are any precedents to this sort of thing ? Should I worry ? Is there anyplace else where this sort of issue has been addressed ?

THANKS

ProbablY just random text in the Blockchain triggering

[kentt]

I'm running avast as well and I do not have that issue.  I even manually scanned appdata/armory to check.

[Flanagan]

I'm running avast as well and I do not have that issue.  I even manually scanned appdata/armory to check.

Thanks both replies.

Yes, I am scanning just the appdata/armory folder with avast too.
What's exactly inside those sst files ? Is it text ?

[Swimmer63]

Having Armory issues for the first time.  Started it up today and came back to the computer and it had locked up.
Would not restart until I restarted my computer.  I am using .88.
Tried it three times and each time the upper progress bar (can't remember what it's called) would complete to 100% and the bottom (transactions?) bar would lock up at 1%.
So I thought I would go the website.  Noticed that .90 was out so I downloaded that.  But it does the same thing.
I am now going to uninstall all the armory software, restart and re-install just .90 and see if that works.
I checked bitcoin-qt and that one is fine.

[CryptKeeper]

Having Armory issues for the first time.  Started it up today and came back to the computer and it had locked up.
Would not restart until I restarted my computer.  I am using .88.
Tried it three times and each time the upper progress bar (can't remember what it's called) would complete to 100% and the bottom (transactions?) bar would lock up at 1%.
So I thought I would go the website.  Noticed that .90 was out so I downloaded that.  But it does the same thing.
I am now going to uninstall all the armory software, restart and re-install just .90 and see if that works.
I checked bitcoin-qt and that one is fine.

I often had lockups with the 0.88 in the initialization phase, but only if I had brought another application to the foreground. Must have something to do with the process prioritiy level when spawning bitcoin-qt, I assume. When I keep it on top and wait during syncing and scanning, it never happened.

[Swimmer63]

Makes sense.

So I did all of the above and it has not locked up, but it is behaving oddly.  I have a tough time opening the transactions pane and it will only show one wallet at a time.
I also got an error message saying that:

Bitcoin-QT is not synched to the network.  Don't start Armory until it's synced.

So I shut Armory and pulled up the Qt.  It was already synced so I'm not sure what Armory's issue is.

[QuantumQrack]

Request:  Would it be possible to set up a recurring transaction in Armory?  I am not sure this functionality has been implemented yet in any wallet.  (I think coinbase has it though, but its a web wallet).  This would be fairly useful to me and perhaps many others. 

[goatpig]

Request:  Would it be possible to set up a recurring transaction in Armory?  I am not sure this functionality has been implemented yet in any wallet.  (I think coinbase has it though, but its a web wallet).  This would be fairly useful to me and perhaps many others. 

This kind of feature is a lot more complicated than it sounds. Possibly as an add-on on top of plug-in modularization, but nothing in the near future if that's what you're looking for.

[QuantumQrack]

Gotcha.  Thanks for the answer.

[etotheipi]

It's that time again... Testing time!

Brought to you by the Armory team, this time.  Yes, we have a team!  A few guys came on recently and are still getting up to speed, but they're contributing, nonetheless.  And even though they're not at full efficiency yet, I think we're finally moving faster than when it was just me by myself  

Version 0.91-beta (currently 0.90.99.0-testing, the testing branch) will not contain any groundbreaking features.  However, it has dramatic stability improvements for all OS, and a whole ton of small-but-important things that improve the user experience.

Here's the list, in arbitrary order (well, kind of reverse-chronological order):

• Use --nospendzeroconfchange to not allow spending of any unconfirmed TxOuts (Armory already deprioritizes ZC change, but it's off-limits with this flag)
• Full P2SH support in send-BTC dialog, address book, tx info, etc
• WinXP support
• Proper unicode path handling (wallets will support unicode in 0.92-beta)
• No more choking on bad blocks written by Bitcoin-Qt/bitcoind
• Major improvements to OSX compatibility!  (hopefully)
• Fixed fonts in OSX
• Bug reporting window
• Progress bars for long-running operations
• Better version notification system (will be implemented before release)
• Factory reset window -- including "Delete Bitcoin-Qt databases and re-download"
• Raspberry Pi offline bundle (process ironed out, will create test bundles soon!)
• Minimize-on-open (in settings)
• Wallets->"Recover Damaged Wallet"
• Wallet creation wizard
• Faster rescanning and rebuilding
• Better logic to prevent unnecessary rescans
• Better zero-conf tx handling
• Fee calculation fixes
• armoryd.py fixes and upgrades
• Multithreading improvements
• Code refactoring

A few points to emphasize:

• Slowness and UI freezes should be mostly gone.  It turns out that large wallets were choking on the number of zero-confirmation transactions on the network, combined with an inefficiency in Armory's handling of them.  It should be dramatically improved.
• We now handle broken blk*.dat files more intelligently (produced by Bitcoin-Qt/bitcoind):  It will pop up a warning if you are affected (instead of seg faulting). We believe that most of the problems people have experienced while syncing and scanning are due to this condition.  .  You can now do a "Factory Reset" which will delete the blk*.dat files and force Bitcoin-Qt to redownload it.
• Arbitrary rescans should be mostly gone.  Unclean shutdowns or not.  It will only rebuild or rescan if it detects problems with the database, or new addresses show up that have not been scanned
• Wallet consistency checks are now performed in the background on every load.  You will see the progress bar at the bottom-left.  If a problem is detected with your wallets, some information should pop up and you can use "Wallets"->"Recover Damaged Wallet" to try to fix it.
• armoryd.py has been upgraded (but still needs a bit more testing).  We have a Python Scripting page to help people get into it, and devchanges.txt describes how developers can update their code to work with the changes between 0.90 and 0.91.
• OSX updates:  No promises that this totally works yet, but we do finally have a [paid!] developer working exclusively in OSX, which means that it will no longer be neglected!  He already found some issues with the prior build process, and thinks the next release will be dramatically improved.  At the very least, the font issues on paper backups should be fixed

I am going to try to do a little more testing, probably followed by some tweaks.  Then I'm going to attempt to do some testing builds for Windows, OSX, and Raspberry Pi!  The RPi builds can easily be integrated into the release process, because goatpig helped figure out how to cross-compile it on my non-ARM build systems.  Sweet!


I will start a new thread for this round of testing, as soon as I flesh out the last few details and get some of the non-Linux testing builds together.  Unfortunatley, I'm leaving for a trip tomorrow -- I hope to get some of it out there before I leave, otherwise it will have to wait until late next week.  If you are adventurous, you can help speed up the process by checking out the "testing" branch and banging on it a bit.

[Holliday]

Awesome! Nice work Armory team!

I like that you've allowed the user to block spending zero confirmation change (and protect themselves from the transaction mutating bot)! Thanks for that!