[Discuss] Mailing Lists Down

[brent sirna]

On Fri, 2006-11-03 at 21:09 -0800, Andrew Willard wrote:
> Alan W. Irwin wrote:
> 
> > What was the exact issue? Is this a problem all mailing list admins should
> > be aware of?  If so, do you have a web reference for a discussion of the
> > issue?
> 
> The problem arose within Python... which Mailman uses thus it effected
> our mailing lists. I'll let Brent give out the gory details on the exact
> error, version numbers and the like. I could try to recall the info but
> with the cold I'm suffering from at the moment I would risk making a
> mistake... cough cough sniff sniff.... :(
> _______________________________________________
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> Discuss at vlug.org
> http://ladybug.vlug.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/discuss

Hi All,

We were having problems with Ladybug and spam so I had a look around. In
the mailman log directory in the file error I found numerous amounts of
these errors.

Oct 29 06:27:58 2006 (25277) SHUNTING: 1162132077.8601091
+1d7480ee4307a2912281f23c1380203824217ae9
Oct 29 06:48:05 2006 (25277) Uncaught runner exception: 'ascii' codec
can't decode byte 0x82 in position 0: ordinal not in range(128)
Oct 29 06:48:05 2006 (25277) Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/lib/mailman/Mailman/Queue/Runner.py", line 111, in _oneloop
    self._onefile(msg, msgdata)
  File "/usr/lib/mailman/Mailman/Queue/Runner.py", line 167, in _onefile
    keepqueued = self._dispose(mlist, msg, msgdata)
  File "/usr/lib/mailman/Mailman/Queue/CommandRunner.py", line 223, in
_dispose
    res = Results(mlist, msg, msgdata)
  File "/usr/lib/mailman/Mailman/Queue/CommandRunner.py", line 77, in
__init__
    subj = make_header(decode_header(subj)).__unicode__()
  File "/usr/lib/python2.3/email/Header.py", line 144, in make_header
    h.append(s, charset)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.3/email/Header.py", line 272, in append
    ustr = unicode(s, incodec, errors)
UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0x82 in position 0:
ordinal not in range(128)

At first I was thinking it was a problem with mailman and had a look at
upgrading the package. Later after I pulled out a few hairs I checked
the python homepage and noticed a recent upgrade to python for the
following error.

Important: 2.3.6 includes a security fix (PSF-2006-001) for the repr()
of unicode strings in wide unicode builds (UCS-4)

My next stop was over to Debian to see if Debian security had an update,
which they did. So one apt-get update / upgrade resolved that issue.
Even after fixing this problem there was concerns about the spammers
using mailman to bounce back spam. So David did some fine tuning on
postfix to hopefully make them find a new sever to pick on.

Thats about it.

Brent