Unable to update Visual Studio Code Insiders

[c0m3tx]

Does this issue occur when all extensions are disabled?: Yes

• VS Code Version: Version: 1.80.0-insider
  Commit: e8b2231
  Date: 2023-06-22T05:34:30.725Z (1 day ago)
  Browser: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Code-Insiders/1.80.0-insider Chrome/108.0.5359.215 Electron/22.3.13 Safari/537.36
• OS Version: Windows 10 64-bit 21H2 19044.3086

Steps to Reproduce:

1. Start Visual Studio Code Insider
2. Click on the cog and select "Restart to update"
3. The updater appears but does nothing, after a minute or so it fails saying
   
4. Pressing retry does nothing (just waits one more minute and fails again), after pressing cancel this message appears
   
5. Pressing ok here does restart Visual Studio Code Insiders (which sees an update ready to be installed)

Related log file

Already tried removing everything and reinstalling from scratch, but did not work.

[joaomoreno]

What is inside this folder?

C:\\Users\\USERNAME\\AppData\\Local\\Programs\\Microsoft VS Code Insiders\\nul

This isn't a folder we ship.

[c0m3tx]

It's a file I'm unable to delete from windows, but I'm able to delete from git bash. However, it is created again as soon as the updater starts up.

[c0m3tx]

It seem I was able to update it by opening a new empty window by deleting that file first. Normally I use it via SSH, and updating via a SSH-connected code instance, or with that file present, fails every time. I will confirm tomorrow if it's repeatable.

[joaomoreno]

Sounds good, let me know.

[c0m3tx]

Can confirm the same issue happened today: tried updating from an SSH-connected instance, and it created that nul file, and the update failed. Opening a new "clean" window, removing that file and running the update worked fine. As far as I understand, nul is a Windows specific invalid name, and therefore the system crashes when trying to access it.

[c0m3tx]

Additional information:
the nul file gets created as soon as I connect to my remote linux machine via SSH, but does not get removed afterwards. I also just found out that the same happens on the stable VSCode version, so it's not a matter of just insiders version. Could it be something on my SSH host?

[joaomoreno]

the nul file gets created as soon as I connect to my remote linux machine via SSH

Very interesting! This doesn't repro for me though, as I connect from Windows to a remote SSH.

@roblourens Have you seen this before?

[joaomoreno]

@c0m3tx Can you try using something like FileActivityWatch to catch which process creates that nul file?

[c0m3tx]

That process ID does not appear in task manager, so I still have no idea what is creating that file.

[c0m3tx]

Seem to be related to

"remote.SSH.useLocalServer": true,

in my configuration. If I disable it, nul does not get created!

[joaomoreno]

Very cool, thanks for that info!

Sadly, I still can't repro, which points to something in your system.

[roblourens]

I've never heard of that before. Thanks for narrowing it down to the useLocalServer setting. There is a known issue with that mode, and I suspect that this is related. I'll close it as a dupe unless I can prove otherwise later microsoft/vscode-remote-release#6227