User Story Testing with Novice QUIC Users

[hlandau]

Get test users without prior knowledge of QUIC or OpenSSL QUIC to try to use OpenSSL QUIC and produce a journal detailing frustration and confusion points they encountered in that process. Our new developers are likely to be suitable guinea pigs for this purpose.

[jamuir]

So far I have reviewed README-QUIC.md and part of the other docs it points to:

• https://www.openssl.org/docs/manmaster/man7/openssl-quic.html
• the four sections on QUIC from the OpenSSL Guide:
  • https://www.openssl.org/docs/manmaster/man7/ossl-guide-quic-introduction.html
  • https://www.openssl.org/docs/manmaster/man7/ossl-guide-quic-client-block.html
  • https://www.openssl.org/docs/manmaster/man7/ossl-guide-quic-multi-stream.html
  • https://www.openssl.org/docs/manmaster/man7/ossl-guide-quic-client-non-block.html

My comments are in the attached markdown file.
jm-journal-part1.md

I have opened the following PR with some minor doc and demo-code fixes:

openssl/openssl#22483

Generally, I think the QUIC docs and demos are very good. Stylistically, my preference would be to use more commas in the prose :-) I find commas make for easier reading.

Two things to point out (both of which are mentioned in the attached file):

1. when using openssl s_client -quic ... any text typed by the user after the connection is made may be replayed in their shell. This happened to me when the connection timed out. This could be dangerous (e.g. if someone types rm important-file).
2. The QUIC demo applications no longer execute successfully for me. This seems to be due to a service change on www.example.org on 23 Oct (see the attached file for more details).

[hlandau]

Great work.

The QUIC demo applications no longer execute successfully for me. This seems to be due to a service change on www.example.org on 23 Oct (see the attached file for more details).

Heh — I wasn't even aware www.example.org worked, I used it because it's a standard convention to use that domain as a placeholder in documentation, not as a suggestion to actually try it. Try www.cloudflare.com:443.

[jamuir]

No luck with www.cloudflare.com:

demos/guide$ LD_LIBRARY_PATH=../.. ./quic-client-block 
Failed to connect to the server
40376BBD9E7F0000:error:0A0000CF:SSL routines:quic_do_handshake:protocol is shutdown:ssl/quic/quic_impl.c:1694:

Note that the comments in the demo Makefile suggest users can execute the applications:

$ head -n 7 demos/guide/Makefile 
#
# To run the demos when linked with a shared library (default) ensure that
# libcrypto and libssl are on the library path. For example to run the
# tls-client-block demo:
#
#    LD_LIBRARY_PATH=../.. ./tls-client-block

The TLS demos work fine against www.example.com.

I think there is value in having a real server to talk to when you are just learning about QUIC. We discussed this some at today's stand-up and there were a few suggestions. I have opened #261 for this.

[jamuir]

Matt C noted that there is a ticket open to update the demos to accept host, port, alpn as command-line args ( #252 ). If those args are mandatory, then that would avoid the problem of users (like me :-) ) thinking that they should be able to talk to www.example.com.

[mattcaswell]

Your notes in the attached markdown are perfect and very interesting. It clearly shows where we need to add some clearer explanations and examples.