The mailing list for listmasters using Sympa

[Miles Fidelman <address@concealed>]

On 11/10/18 6:05 AM, Stefan Hornburg (Racke) wrote:

> On 11/9/18 6:03 PM, Miles Fidelman wrote:
> > On 11/9/18 5:50 AM, Stefan Hornburg (Racke) wrote:
> >
> > > On 10/30/18 5:59 PM, Matt Taggart wrote:
> > > > On 10/29/2018 11:39 AM, Miles Fidelman wrote:
> > > >
> > > > > Any suggestions as to:
> > > > >
> > > > > - things that might cause sympa.pl to die abnormally?
> > > > >
> > > > > - any diagnostic tricks (higher log levels, where to set them, etc?)
> > > > We have seen UTF8 bugs that cause this. We end up doing a binary search
> > > > of the messages in the spool until we figure out which one is crashing
> > > > it. We haven't seen it much lately, I suspect that we moved to newer
> > > > perl libraries and some bug was fixed.
> > > In my opinion Sympa should handle this situation gracefully, as a single 
> > > message can bring the Sympa system to a
> > > grinding halt without even a notification to the listmaster.
> > >
> > > Regards
> > >            Racke
> > I don't think you're going to see any objections to that notion! :-)
> >
> > I expect that it's easier said than done, particularly when things crash in 
> > external libraries.
> >
> > Though... it might be simple enough to checkpoint when starting to process a 
> > message, and then setting a watchdog to
> > look for crashes, and then do some exception handling (log, set the message 
> > aside, notify the listmaster, restart).
> My idea would to move the message file before processing, so Sympa doesn't 
> crash again when it is restarted (which
> systemd can do automatically).
>
> And of course the listmaster should be notified.

That makes a lot of sense.

> > Anybody on the coding team care to comment?
> I'm going to have a closer look at the code in question.
>
> So it would also good to gather the information about the crashes. The one I 
> got recently:
>
> Nov  7 08:34:18 post sympa_msg[12414]: err main::#243 > Sympa::Spindle::spin#92 
> > Sympa::Spindle::DoMessage::_twist#92 >
> Sympa::Spindle::DoMessage::_check_command#158 > Sympa::Message::get_plain_body#2176 
> > MIME::Charset::new#432 >
> MIME::Charset::_find_encoder#467 > (eval)#1 > (eval)#1 > 
> MIME::Charset::BEGIN#1 DIED: Can't locate Encode/EUCJPASCII.pm
> in @INC (you may need to install the Encode::EUCJPASCII module) (@INC 
> contains: /usr/share/sympa/lib /etc/perl
> /usr/local/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/perl/5.20.2 /usr/local/share/perl/5.20.2 
> /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/perl5/5.20
> /usr/share/perl5 /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/perl/5.20 /usr/share/perl/5.20 
> /usr/local/lib/site_perl .) at (eval 208) line 1.

Unfortunately, I'm still running 6.1.x - I'm not getting any log that 
looks remotely like that - just completely silent crashes, even at the 
highest log level.

Soji indicated that there's better logging with 6.2 - I guess I should 
set aside some time to update.

Thanks,

Miles



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In practice, there is.  .... Yogi Berra