The Hidden Service Manager in the Router Console just kept telling me to come back after 2 minutes - even after weeks …

Tunnels are not initialized yet, please reload in two minutes.

This also meant I wasn’t able to modify/create tunnels, as the GUI didn’t show anything aside from that message. Meanwhile the router seemed to work fine, as in participating in many connections and pushing MBs/s. So I was wondering what the heck is going on here.

Now I remembered, that I was tuning this router by disabling all the services I wasn’t going to use. My notes said just that and lacked any details, though. So the usual ports for irc, mail, and http not being open didn’t worry me. But the GUI not allowing to start them again seemed kind of … wrong?

I started looking into the config files and checked what services I had disabled:

root@i2p:~# grep -r "startOnLoad=" /var/lib/i2p/i2p-config/
/var/lib/i2p/i2p-config/clients.config.d/00-net.i2p.router.web.RouterConsoleRunner-clients.config:clientApp.0.startOnLoad=true
/var/lib/i2p/i2p-config/clients.config.d/01-net.i2p.sam.SAMBridge-clients.config:clientApp.0.startOnLoad=false
/var/lib/i2p/i2p-config/clients.config.d/03-net.i2p.jetty.JettyStart-clients.config:clientApp.0.startOnLoad=false
/var/lib/i2p/i2p-config/clients.config.d/04-net.i2p.apps.systray.UrlLauncher-clients.config:clientApp.0.startOnLoad=false
/var/lib/i2p/i2p-config/clients.config.d/05-net.i2p.BOB.BOB-clients.config:clientApp.0.startOnLoad=false
/var/lib/i2p/i2p-config/clients.config.d/02-net.i2p.i2ptunnel.TunnelControllerGroup-clients.config:clientApp.0.startOnLoad=false
[...]

The last entry shown here catched my eye somehow. ControllerGroup did kinda sound like “the whole thing” and not just a single client, so I just went ahead and enabled this one again:

root@i2p:~# vim /var/lib/i2p/i2p-config/clients.config.d/02-net.i2p.i2ptunnel.TunnelControllerGroup-clien
ts.config
clientApp.0.startOnLoad=true

And indeed, after a restart of the router, the Hidden Service Manager GUI was back. Now I had done a number of things inbetween these lines, like checking open ports, checking log-files, and asking IRC about it. In the end this might have taken me 2-3 hours to deal with, but I was just lucky to stumble upon the right hinch there. My backup-plan would have been to just do a clean re-install/new setup, but that’s always a pitty with well-integrated routers.

Maybe there should be a more detailed message when this occurs? Or if that group must not be turned off, maybe it should be set always-on or so? I honestly have no idea. I mean, it was me fiddling with the config there, right? ;)