Allow to configure which desktop-notifications should be shown

[DarthAffe]

What would you like to add or change?:
It would be great to be able to configure which type of desktop-notifications should be shown.
For example I want to see the access-request notifications, but I don't care about the "Configured DNS Servers Failing"-notification

Why do you and others need this?:
For whatever reason Portmaster believes regularly that my DNS is not available (which is not the case, everything works perfectly fine even when this message is shown and the tray-icon dot is red) which causes the "Configured DNS Servers Failing"-notification to be shown. Since there aren't any issues in that case it's quite annoying to get that all the time and it would be great, if I could just disable that one notification.

[github-actions]

Greetings and welcome to our community! As this is the first issue you opened here, we wanted to share some useful infos with you:

• 🗣️ Our community on Discord is super helpful and active. We also have an AI-enabled support bot that knows Portmaster well and can give you immediate help.
• 📖 The Wiki answers all common questions and has many important details. If you can't find an answer there, let us know, so we can add anything that's missing.

[Raphty]

Hey @DarthAffe, welcome in our community.

How did you verify, that the DNS is working besides your connection still working. because Portmaster can fallback to other resolvers automatically if the dns if failing, and the issue you are describing is not something we get a lot of complaints about.

In normal operations without issues Portmaster does basically never send notifications. So this setting would not be a priority.

[github-actions]

Hey @DarthAffe, thank you for raising this issue with us.

After a first review we noticed that we will require the Debug Info for further investigation. However, you haven't supplied any Debug Info in your report.

Please collect Debug Info from Portmaster while the reported issue is present.

[DarthAffe]

Hey, thanks for the quick reply.
First of all my understanding of the fallback mechanism was, that it falls back to the system-dns if the one configured in portmaster fails - these are the same in my case (it's the one from my opensense).

But I looked at the Core-Logs and it contains a bunch of entries like this:

240408 20:16:43.420 er/resolve:460 > WARN 346 resolver: query to dns://192.168.10.1:53#config failed: dial udp :50211->192.168.10.1:53: bind: Der Zugriff auf einen Socket war aufgrund der Zugriffsrechte des Sockets unzulässig.

or this

240408 22:12:24.452 work/ports:049 > WARN 741 network: took 11 attempts to find a suitable unused port for pre-auth

Searching this error leads to a lot of issues similar to this in different programs that seem to be related to the use of Hyper-V which would make sense since I'm using WSL.
For example this issue:
docker/for-win#3171

To me this could explain this behavior (at least without knowledge about the portmaster internals) and it would also explain why it is not consistant (like it was really bad the last few days, especially yesterday when I decided to open the issue, but it didn't show up once since the last boot 4 hours ago - but I had no VM running so far)

For now I'll continue observing this and collect the debug info as soon as the problem occurs again.

[Raphty]

we are aware that WSL creates issues, we weren't aware of those though, thanks for letting us know. Keep in mind that any kind of VM is currently OOS for us. #166

help is always appreciated.

[e-t-l]

FYI, I also get "configured DNS server failing" notifications because I use DNScrypt-proxy, and presumably a DNS request takes a little too long sometimes and it times out (I mentioned an enhancement to help with this in #1373 but no one replied and the issue was closed by a bot).

This is all to say that I too would appreciate more granular desktop notification controls.

[mherrmann3]

A similar configuration also regularly triggers further (annoying) notifications:

• "Speed Up Website Loading ... because DNS queries are currently slower than expected. ..."
• "Blocked bypass attempt by Dnscrypt proxy ... is using its own secure DNS resolver ... If Dnscrypt Proxy experiences problems, disable Secure DNS..."

So I'd highly welcome switching off individual notifications, too.

My Unexpected Logs also contain similar entries like @DarthAffe (er/resolve:460 - not sure what they exactly mean and what triggers them, but those do not seem to be associated with notifications), but also:

er/metrics:075 > WARN 228 resolver: suggesting user to use stale dns cache with avg query time of 140ms for config and system resolvers

which also does not seem to trigger notifications.

[Raphty]

I am curios @mherrmann3 when you see the notification that DNS crypt proxy is blocked... why do you keep it? or why don't you take action? AFAIK the only purpose of that app is encrypted dns which Portmaster tells you it blocked.

The DNS Cash you can disable the notification by enabling and disabling the cash setting (if I am not mistaken we only check if the setting has been modified not which state it is in, so any modification should remove the notification)

[mherrmann3]

Well, it seems that it is actually not blocked (or at least not that I know of), as can be confirmed with a DNS leak test: it reports the DNS servers I specified in dnscrypt-proxy. I now disabled "Block Secure DNS Bypassing" for dnscrypt-proxy. Is this what you meant?
Edit: I believe I resolved this aspect by resetting/defaulting DNS server settings in the system (on Windows: Network Connections > Adapter > Properties > IPv4) and only specifying them in the Portmaster (dns://127.0.0.1:53, dns://[::1]:53).

Thanks, I switched the setting "Always Use DNS Cache" on and off. I will observe if the related notification comes up again.