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Maintenance & Troubleshooting

View the current connections between client and server

You can run mieru get connections command on the client to view the current connections between client and server. An example of the command output is as follows.

SessionID   Protocol  Local       Remote             State        RecvQ+Buf  SendQ+Buf  LastRecv  LastSend
3078661580  UDP       [::]:34453  12.34.123.45:5852  ESTABLISHED  0+0        0+0        0s (31)   0s (28)
3408448183  UDP       [::]:34453  12.34.123.45:5852  ESTABLISHED  0+0        0+0        3s (22)   3s (21)

Similarly, you can run mita get connections command on the server to view the current connections between the server and all clients.

Check connectivity between client and server

To determine if the connectivity is OK, you can look at the client metrics. To get the metrics, run command mieru get metrics. In the following example,

{
    "cipher - client": {
        "DirectDecrypt": 64540,
        "FailedDirectDecrypt": 0
    },
    "connections": {
        "ActiveOpens": 130,
        "CurrEstablished": 2,
        "MaxConn": 35,
        "PassiveOpens": 0
    },
    "HTTP proxy": {
        "ConnErrors": 2,
        "Requests": 130,
        "SchemeErrors": 0
    },
    "replay": {
        "KnownSession": 0,
        "NewSession": 0,
        "NewSessionDecrypted": 0
    },
    "socks5": {
        "ConnectionRefusedErrors": 0,
        "DNSResolveErrors": 0,
        "HandshakeErrors": 1,
        "HostUnreachableErrors": 0,
        "NetworkUnreachableErrors": 0,
        "UDPAssociateErrors": 0,
        "UnsupportedCommandErrors": 0
    },
    "socks5 UDP associate": {
        "DownloadBytes": 0,
        "DownloadPackets": 0,
        "UploadBytes": 0,
        "UploadPackets": 0
    },
    "traffic": {
        "DownloadBytes": 257341785,
        "OutputPaddingBytes": 511223,
        "UploadBytes": 1254325
    },
    "underlay": {
        "ActiveOpens": 16,
        "CurrEstablished": 7,
        "MaxConn": 11,
        "PassiveOpens": 0,
        "UnderlayMalformedUDP": 0,
        "UnsolicitedUDP": 0
    }
}

if the value of connections -> CurrEstablished is not 0, there is an active connection between the client and the server at this moment; if the value of cipher - client -> DirectDecrypt is not 0, the client has successfully decrypted the response packets sent by the server.

Troubleshooting suggestions

mieru enhances server-side stealth in order to prevent GFW active probing, but it also makes debugging more difficult. If you cannot establish a connection between your client and server, it may be helpful to start with the following steps.

  1. Is the server working properly? Use the ping command to confirm whether the client can reach the server.
  2. Is the mita proxy service started? Use the mita status command to check.
  3. Is the mieru client started? Use the mieru status command to check.
  4. Are the port numbers of the client and server settings the same? Is the username the same? Is the password the same? Use mieru describe config and mita describe config to check.
  5. Open the debug logs for both the client and server to see exactly what is happening with your network connection.

If you can't solve the problem, you can submit a GitHub issue to contact the developers.

Configuration file location

The configuration of the mita proxy server is stored in /etc/mita/server.conf.pb. This is a binary file in protocol buffer format. To protect user information, mita does not store the user's password in plain text, it only stores the checksum.

The configuration file of the mieru client is also a binary file. It is stored in the following locations in different operating systems.

Operating System Configuration File Path Example Path
Linux $HOME/.config/mieru/client.conf.pb /home/enfein/.config/mieru/client.conf.pb
Mac OS $HOME/Library/Application Support/mieru/client.conf.pb /Users/enfein/Library/Application Support/mieru/client.conf.pb
Windows %USERPROFILE%\AppData\Roaming\mieru\client.conf.pb C:\Users\enfein\AppData\Roaming\mieru\client.conf.pb

View mita proxy server log

The user can print the recent log of mita proxy server using the following command.

sudo journalctl -u mita -xe --no-pager

View mieru client log

The location of the client mieru log files is shown in the following table.

Operating System Log Files Path Example Path
Linux $HOME/.cache/mieru/ or $XDG_CACHE_HOME/mieru/ /home/enfein/.cache/mieru/
Mac OS $HOME/Library/Caches/mieru/ /Users/enfein/Library/Caches/mieru/
Windows %USERPROFILE%\AppData\Local\mieru\ C:\Users\enfein\AppData\Local\mieru\

Each log file uses the format yyyyMMdd_HHmm_PID.log, where yyyyMMdd_HHmm is the time when the mieru process was started and PID is the process number. Each time mieru is restarted, a new log file is generated. When there are too many log files, the old ones will be deleted automatically.

Enable and disable debug logging

mieru / mita prints very little information at the default log level, which does not contain sensitive information such as IP addresses, port numbers, etc. If you need to diagnose a single network connection, you need to turn on the debug logging.

The project provides configuration files for quickly enable and disable debug logs in the configs/templates directory. Please download them to your server or local computer and enter the following commands. Note that changing the settings of mieru requires restarting the service to take effect.

# enable debug logging
mita apply config server_enable_debug_logging.json

# OR disable debug logging
mita apply config server_disable_debug_logging.json

# This will not interrupt traffic
mita reload

# enable debug logging
mieru apply config client_enable_debug_logging.json

# OR disable debug logging
mieru apply config client_disable_debug_logging.json

mieru stop

mieru start

All supported logging levels include FATAL, ERROR, WARN, INFO, DEBUG and TRACE.

Changing the Metrics Logging Interval

By default, mieru / mita prints metrics information in the logs every 10 minutes. If you want to adjust this output interval, use the following settings:

{
    "advancedSettings": {
        "metricsLoggingInterval": "1h30m"
    }
}

You can specify the interval in:

  • seconds s
  • minutes m
  • hours h

or any combination of these units.

View User Network Traffic

You can run the commands mita get users and mita get quotas on the server to check each user's most recent active time and the amount of network traffic used.

$ mita get users
User  LastActive            1DayDownload  1DayUpload  30DaysDownload  30DaysUpload
abcd  2025-04-23T01:02:03Z  938.1MiB      12.9MiB     4.0GiB          31.8MiB

$ mita get quotas
User  Days  Limit    Usage
abcd  1     10.0GiB  951.1MiB
abcd  7     40.0GiB  4.0GiB

Environment Variables

If necessary, you can use environment variables to control the behavior of the server and the client.

  • MITA_CONFIG_JSON_FILE loads the JSON server configuration file from this path.
  • MITA_CONFIG_FILE loads the protocol buffer server configuration file from this path.
  • MIERU_CONFIG_JSON_FILE loads the JSON client configuration file from this path.
  • MIERU_CONFIG_FILE loads the protocol buffer client configuration file from this path.
  • If MITA_LOG_NO_TIMESTAMP is not empty, the server log does not print timestamps. Since journald already provides timestamps, we enable this by default to avoid printing duplicate timestamps.
  • MITA_UDS_PATH creates the server UNIX domain socket file using this path. The default path is /var/run/mita/mita.sock.
  • If MITA_INSECURE_UDS is not empty, do not enforce the user and access rights to the server UNIX domain socket file /var/run/mita/mita.sock. This setting can be used on systems that are very restricted (e.g., cannot create new users).

Running Client in the Foreground

In the following situations, users may want to run mieru client in the foreground:

  • Running multiple mieru client processes simultaneously.
  • Having mieru client start with the system.
  • Quickly debugging mieru client configuration.

On a Linux system, assuming the path to the mieru client configuration file is /etc/mieru_client_config.json, users can run the client in the foreground using the following command:

MIERU_CONFIG_JSON_FILE=/etc/mieru_client_config.json mieru run

At this point, the logs of the mieru client will be printed directly to the terminal. Press Ctrl+C to exit.

Disable Client Automatic Check Update

When you start the mieru client, it will automatically check for updates every few days. If you want to turn off automatic check update, add the following client configuration:

{
    "advancedSettings": {
        "noCheckUpdate": true
    }
}

Reset Server Metrics

Server metrics are stored in the /var/lib/mita/metrics.pb file. Even if the server is restarted, you can read the accumulated metrics using the mita get metrics, mita get users and mita get quotas commands. If you want to reset the metrics, you can run the following command:

sudo systemctl stop mita && sudo rm -f /var/lib/mita/metrics.pb && sudo systemctl start mita