pidgin and VPN issues.

[Mark Doliner]

On Tue, Apr 16, 2013 at 6:32 AM, Richard Allen <ra at ra.is> wrote:
> I'm using pidgin on Fedora 18 (This was also an issue in 17).    My work requires me to fire up multiple VPN profiles each day.  Normally this is fine.  However when disengaging the VPN pidgin tends to lock up.  This happens both with Cisco compatible (vpnc) profiles and also Anyconnect profiles.    I use network manager for all VPN needs.
>
> When pidgin is frozen, there is no indication in the GUI (i.e. I dont notice anything) and pidgin is unkillable.   I have to use kill -9 to stop it.
>
> Is this a known issue or are there any workarounds?

That sounds kinda crazy and obviously shouldn't happen.  I'm mildly
curious what Pidgin is doing when this happens.  Does the UI become
gtk gray and blanked out and is unresponsive?

If you have a desire to do some debugging, it might be helpful to
obtain a backtrace by using "gdb /path/to/pidgin 123PID456" to use gdb
to connect to the running Pidgin instance and then repeat these
commands a few times: "backtrace," "continue," CTRL+c.  If Pidgin is
in an infinite loop that will print backtraces hopefully at different
places in the loop.  You could also step through line by line.  Or
"kill -6" to dump a core file and then get a backtrace from that.

There are some more details here:
https://developer.pidgin.im/wiki/GetABacktrace

And info on filing a bug report here:
https://developer.pidgin.im/wiki/TipsForBugReports