The mailing list for listmasters using Sympa

[Patrick Rynhart <address@concealed>]

On 12/11/2013 5:01 p.m., Steve Shipway wrote:
> > In our production Sympa environment running version v6.1.14 (Élias) we
> > have found a message which makes a bulk.pl hang.  Further, it seems to
> > stop all lists on our listserv from processing (until we manually kill
> > off affected bulk.pl process(es) and restart Sympa services).
>
> The regexp error you mention seems to occur in the TT2 parsing code.
>
> Does this list have MailMerge enabled on it?  Possibly this is causing the 
> problem, as the message has something in it that looks like TT2 code but 
> isn’t.  If so, disable mailmerge on the list (you should have it disabled 
> anyway for this sort of data)

Brilliant - that's what the issue was alright.  I had enabled 
merge_feature by default (i.e. "merge_feature on" in sympa.conf).

Thank you very much for this.  We've had a few unexplained / strange 
hangs of bulk.pl processes - hopefully this addresses it.  (I had 
wondered why attempts were being made to regexp parse the message.)  I 
have run sympa.pl --reload_list_config to rebuild our binary config 
files, and intend to 'whitelist' any lists that need this feature.

It would seem that you need to be careful with this setting.  As noted, 
this caused our entire listserv to become unavailable.  (By sending a 
'bad' message, such as the one sent to our list, it looks like a DoS can 
be caused on demand if merge_feature is known to be enabled on a 
particular list and you have rights to post.)

Because this bad message was already queued, I had to manually set 
merge_bulkmailer to 0 in bulkmailer_table (independent of changing the 
list configuration) to get the message to clear.

Thanks again - this is great.

Regards,

Patrick

> Another possibility is a problem in the notification templates.
>
> Steve
>
> Steve Shipway
> ITS Unix Services Design Lead
> University of Auckland, New Zealand
> Floor 1, 58 Symonds Street, Auckland
> Phone: +64 (0)9 3737599 ext 86487
> DDI: +64 (0)9 923 6487
> Mobile: +64 (0)21 753 189
> Email: address@concealed
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