The mailing list for listmasters using Sympa

["Michael L. Hitch" <address@concealed>]

On Wed, 4 Jan 2012, address@concealed wrote:

> I'm experiencing wwsympa.pl freeze when browsing on the administration pages
> of a list using plus signs (+) in its name.  The first administration page
> displays correctly, but then wwsympa.pl seems to enter an infinite loop (the
> process continues to run) and any subsequent request is dropped.
>
> It takes more than restarting the web server to recover from this crash, the
> identification cookie on the user side needs to be deleted too.  Probably the
> list name is still present in one session variable.  Renaming the list and
> removing all + signs solved the problem.
>
> But the list creation interface doesn't prevent new list to use the plus sign
> again.  Is this a valid character to be used in list names?  If not, then why
> is not caught by the list creating interface?
>
> We're using the 6.0.1 Debian version of Sympa with the fastCGI module.  The
> list behaved correctly in the 5.x Sympa serie.  Do any of you have experienced
> this behaviour?  Looking at the Changelog file, I don't see any sign of a bug
> of this kind being solved in the newer versions, should I fill a bug report?

  I had a similar problem when I was working on converting our old lists 
to Sympa a couple of years ago.  I was using Sympa 6.0, and was using the 
original email addresses modified so I wouldn't accidentally send out 
test messages.  The addresses were something like 
address@concealed.  When I'd select an 
email address from a review, it would display the editsubscriber page 
fine, but anything after that would error out, and there would be a 
wwsympa.fcgi process spinning.  If I cleared my browser session cookie, I 
could log back in and continue.

  I later looked at the session_table entry and noticed that the 
redirect_url entry in the data_session included the email address in the 
url.  I don't remember the exact details, but it appeared to be a problem 
with the encoding (or failure to encode) of the '+' character [I had a few 
addresses that also used the '/' character that caused the same 
behaviour].  If I reset the redirect_url part of the data_session data, I 
was usually able to continue after that without the wwsympa.fcgi process 
looping.  After poking around the redirect_url handling, I came up with a 
patch that seemed to fix it for me at the time.  For some reason I did not 
apply that patch when I upgraded to 6.1, and have not run into that 
problem again.  I just verified that I can't reproduce the problem I 
originally had.

  I don't know if the Sympa upgrade made it go away, or perhaps an apache 
server upgrade fixed it.

  My patch was to use the REQUEST_URI instead of the PATH_INFO environment 
variable (the escaping of certain characters was done differently between 
the two).  The patch I was using at the time in case you want to try it:

--- /home/sympa/bin/wwsympa.fcgi.orig   2010-04-04 10:42:29.000000000 -0600
+++ /home/sympa/bin/wwsympa.fcgi        2010-04-03 16:21:27.000000000 -0600
@@ -1253,7 +1253,8 @@ my $birthday = time ;
      ## POST is not handled
      ## A lot of other methods where used in the past (before session was 
introduced in Sympa). We must clean all.
      unless ($temporary_actions{$action} || $ENV{'REQUEST_METHOD'} ne 'GET') 
{
-        $session->{'redirect_url'} = 
$param->{'base_url'}.$param->{'path_cgi'}.$ENV{'PATH_INFO'};
+##      $session->{'redirect_url'} = 
$param->{'base_url'}.$param->{'path_cgi'}.$ENV{'PATH_INFO'};
+        $session->{'redirect_url'} = 
$param->{'base_url'}.$ENV{'REQUEST_URI'};
      }

      $action ||= &Conf::get_robot_conf($robot, 'default_home');


---
Michael L. Hitch                        address@concealed
Operations Consulting,  Information Technology Center
Montana State University, Bozeman, MT     USA