Vaderf
March 24, 2025, 12:52am
1
Hi everyone,
Since Skype will end soon, I would like to give Jami another try. I created an account in 2018 when Jami was called Ring. When starting Jami, my previous Ring account was not migrated correctly and the account did not show up. I was able to retrieve the certificate, key and config files from a previous backup and restore the account. However, I was unable to create the archive.gz file. This prevents me from backing up the account in Jami or sharing it with another device. In debug mode, I receive an error stating that the archive.gz file does not exist. I wonder if this is actually a bug, Jami should be able to generate a missing archive.gz file.
I have tried a few things:
I used the export.gz file from Ring without success. My understanding is that this file is a similar file to archive.gz but seems to be encrypted (source ). However, the aes-256-gcm is no longer available in openssl, preventing me to decrypt it.
I created and empty archive.gz file using another account and removing all data related to that account but this was unsuccessful. Jami complained about missing keys.
My understanding is that the keys that are in the archive.gz file are encrypted. However, I don’t know which cypher or algorithm is used for this. I tried looking through the code but did not find anything obvious.
I would appreciate any guidance on how to generate the archive.gz file using a command or how to encrypt the keys so that I can manually add them to an archive.gz file.
Thank you in advance!
Vaderf
March 24, 2025, 3:44am
3
Hi @ovari ,
Thank you for the suggestion.
I renamed my export.gz as suggested but it did not work. I also tried possible password of that time without success. I suspect that the encrypted export.gz is still the problem. For good measure, I also tried with the archive.gz of the other new account, and it worked (but this does not solve my problem).
ovari
March 24, 2025, 3:56am
4
Can you start a new Jami account?
Vaderf
March 24, 2025, 4:14am
5
If you mean starting fresh and forgetting about the old account, I technically can, but I won’t be able to use my username. My old account is perfectly functional: I can call and text people. However, due to the absence of the archive.gz file, I cannot link other devices or backup easily my current account.
In addition, I think this is a broader issue. If anyone ends up with a corrupted archive.gz file but a valid account, they are stuck. The archive.gz file is generated when creating an account, so there should be a way to regenerate it.
Vaderf
March 27, 2025, 3:59am
6
Hi everyone,
I finally solved my problem. My export.gz file was encrypted with a password. I decrypted the file by installing an old version of Ring available through the Wayback machine . I then removed the password to produce a clear export.gz which I was able to use with Jami.
Knowing the correct password, I tried importing the encrypted export.gz file with the current version of Jami without success, suggesting that Jami uses a different encryption method than Ring. Again, this clearly justifies having an option to recreate (encrypted) archive.gz file, especially if encryption method changes overtime which is not improbable given my example.
Anyway, thank you for the help with this.
Could you try importing your old archive with logs enabled and provide the result ? Thanks
Vaderf
March 28, 2025, 3:59am
8
Hi @aberaud ,
Here is the log when creating a new account by importing the export.gz file (minus what I deemed sensitive):
[1743133595.659|55287] UPnPContext: Starting dedicated io_context thread
Happy to provide more information if needed.