Gateway auto-restart stalls at login screen on unhandled promotional interstitial dialog (titled "Gateway")

[hpadmanabhan]

Environment

• IBC 3.24.1 (bundled in the gnzsnz/ib-gateway-docker image, tag 10.45.1j)
• IB Gateway 10.45.1j, paper account, headless under Xvfb (Linux container)
• Scheduled nightly restart via AutoRestartTime

What happened

At the scheduled auto-restart, the Gateway reached the login dialog and then displayed an additional dialog that IBC did not recognize. IBC logged the dialog events but took no action, and the login never proceeded — the session stalled indefinitely (>12 minutes) until we restarted the container, after which login completed normally in seconds.

Log excerpt from the stall:

2026-08-25 23:00:07:437 IBC: Invoking config dialog menu
2026-08-25 23:00:07:442 IBC: Login dialog WINDOW_OPENED: LoginState is LOGGED_OUT
2026-08-25 23:00:07:721 IBC: detected dialog entitled: Gateway; event=Opened
2026-08-25 23:00:07:747 IBC: GATEWAY

2026-08-25 23:00:07:747 IBC: detected frame entitled: IBKR Gateway; event=Lost focus
2026-08-25 23:00:07:749 IBC: detected dialog entitled: Gateway; event=Focused
(no further log output — login never proceeded)

What the dialog was

The Gateway's settings folder cached a 1200x1000 promotional image (an IBKR "Trade Prediction Markets" marketing interstitial) with a file timestamp matching the dialog detection to the second, so the blocking dialog appears to be a marketing interstitial served at the login screen (LoginState was LOGGED_OUT when it opened). Two full boot logins the same evening — one before and one after the stall — completed normally (the earlier one had also cached a similar promotional asset without any blocking dialog); only the auto-restart cycle displayed the blocking dialog.

Ask

A handler that dismisses promotional/interstitial dialogs at the login screen — or a configurable action/timeout for unrecognized dialogs while LoginState is LOGGED_OUT — would prevent unattended installations from wedging on marketing content. LoginDialogDisplayTimeout does not cover this case since the login dialog was displayed.

Happy to provide the full log or the cached interstitial image if useful.

[rlktradewright]

I've spent a while looking at this and I'm slowly coming to the realisation that I've misunderstood the implications of the structure of this particular dialog: (the one whose title is just Gateway or IBKR Gateway). This dialog is used in various places to bring things to the user's attention, and it incorporates an element that can render HTML. IBC needs to be able to examine any text that's displayed in this area, in order to decide whether to dismiss the dialog or leave it on display. Because of my misunderstanding, it currently fails to correctly retrieve the text so it always leaves the dialog on display.

So I need to improve my code to ensure that it retrieves the text correctly: the obvious solution here is to incorporate an HTML parser such as JSoup into IBC, but I'm reluctant to do this unless it's really necessary..

Your suggestion of dismissing such dialogs after a certain time when in the logged off state, has merit, and I'll look into it.

In the meantime, it would be worth seeing the full IBC log and the offending image - please attach them to your reply.

[hpadmanabhan]

Thanks for digging into this — the HTML-rendering explanation matches what the log shows. Requested materials:

Full log: ibc-gateway-wedge-20260825-2300ET.log (the container runs IBC with console output only, so this is the container log for the incident window, 22:55–23:16 ET; docker's first-column timestamps are UTC). Lightly scrubbed: account codes and a couple of environment-specific tokens redacted — nothing in the IBC output itself was altered.

The offending dialog (its rendered content, captured from the frozen session):

The stall sequence, for convenience (full context in the gist):

2026-08-25 23:00:07:442 IBC: Login dialog WINDOW_OPENED: LoginState is LOGGED_OUT
2026-08-25 23:00:07:721 IBC: detected dialog entitled: Gateway; event=Opened
2026-08-25 23:00:07:747 IBC: GATEWAY

2026-08-25 23:00:07:747 IBC: detected frame entitled: IBKR Gateway; event=Lost focus
2026-08-25 23:00:07:747 IBC: detected frame entitled: IBKR Gateway; event=Deactivated
2026-08-25 23:00:07:747 IBC: detected dialog entitled: Gateway; event=Activated
2026-08-25 23:00:07:749 IBC: detected dialog entitled: Gateway; event=Focused
[no further output for 12m36s, until our manual container restart:]
2026-08-26T03:12:43Z .> Received SIGINT or SIGTERM. Shutting down IB Gateway.

A few observations that seem to support your diagnosis:

• The IBC: GATEWAY line at 23:00:07:747 (followed by a blank line) looks like the dialog-text retrieval yielding only the uppercased title with an empty body — consistent with the text living in an HTML-rendering element IBC can't currently read.
• The dialog appeared ~300 ms after the login dialog opened in LOGGED_OUT state, i.e. before any credentials were entered, so it isn't gated on the account.
• After our container restart at 23:12:44 (full re-authentication, autorestart file gone), the same login path completed normally in ~8 s — including a conventional Warning dialog that IBC read and dismissed fine (Click button: I understand and accept). The promotional dialog did not reappear, which fits it being an ad-server interstitial rather than a deterministic part of the login flow.

Happy to test a patch build against this setup if that would help — the restart schedule makes reproduction opportunistic, but the environment is easy to leave armed.