Privoxy doesn't always start on boot
 

Sometimes when I boot my PC, privoxy starts up, and sometimes it doesn't. Not a big problem. It is easy to start manually. But it's damn annoying. I am using Ubuntu 9.10. It didn't happen in earlier versions of Ubuntu. Anyone know how to make it start every time I boot?

If you can start it by hand without error, it's difficult to say why it does not start on boot without any additional info.

Did you try to activate all logging levels and did you activate the logfile?
Did you look into the error file?
Both files usually reside in /var/log/privoxy/ and the configuration is in /etc/privoxy/config

If you get an error message from there, come back here and post it.

I found a message in the logfile:

Nov 24 08:02:54.331 7f46556f16f0 Fatal error: can't bind to localhost:8118: The hostname is not resolvable

I don't understand what this means. localhost resolves without problem when I try myself, and i've got nothing else running on port 8118.

In /etc/privoxy/config,
try to change
to

I think that solved it, but i have to wait a few weeks and see. Thanks anyway

Nope. Still got the same problem. For some strange reason it can't resolve the hostname 127.0.0.1:8118
Here is the message from the logfile:

Nov 26 14:28:25.998 7f660f6796f0 Fatal error: can't bind to 127.0.0.1:8118: The hostname is not resolvable

As this thread does not appear to be server-specific, I have moved it to "Linux Software" so it may get the exposure it deserves.

Sasha

I suddenly noticed that this problem does not only affect privoxy. My mediaserver (MediaTomb) had the same problem today.

It may be that networking sometimes takes so long to set up that it is not finished by the time the Privoxy and MediaTomb startup scripts run. You could try deleting the /etc/rc3.d/S20privoxy symlink and recreating it as S98privoxy -- not much later in elaspsed time during boot but maybe enough given that you do not always get the problem. If it improves the situation but does not completely fix it please ask again.

Caveat: the technique would mean that Privoxy itself is not set up until later in the boot process; that may have undesirable effects (but probably only if you log on to the desktop and browse to a dodgy web page at the speed of lightning).

Hm. Didn't fix it, but it seems to start more often though. Not sure if I did it right either. I just renamed /etc/rc3.d/S20privoxy to S98privoxy.

If the name of the link starts with SXX (S98 in this case) and points to the right script in init.d (which should both be the case if you just renamed it), you did it right.

Perhaps you should rename the links (where present) in all the rcX.d-directories in such a case, to have consistent behaviour across all run levels and in case run level 3 (rc3.d) should not be your default run level (it normally is on most standard distributions, though).

Did you try looking into the various system log files in /var/log/ after you encountered this problem on startup?
Perhaps you are able get information on some networking problem earlier in the boot sequence.