[Mailman-Users] Fix to Not Able to Use Admin Pages

[Steve Lay]

Chuck Dale <bug at aphid.net> wrote:

>Anyone working on finding this bug? There have been about 5 threads from
>people with similar problems over the past month without any resolutions
>other than (delete the list, create it again, delete your cookies -
>choose one of the above).

My guess is that there may be more than one thing going on here and that is
why this problem is getting to people so much.

Firstly, there is a bug on the server in both 1.1 and the new 2.0b4 which
relates to cookies.  Although I reported it last week I noticed that the
same bug was already reported in the "incoming" section of the jitterbug
database.  The bug was also recently discussed on the developers forum (end
of last week).

The bug is triggered when your browser has more than one cookie from the
mailman server - when the browser sends them with the next request the
server gets confused.  That's why deleting all your mailman cookies is a
valid workaround.

To find out if this bug is what is affecting you I recommend going into the
SecurityManager.py file and uncommenting the lines that report the "Browser
cookie" to the debug log file.  I don't know how/when the pyc files are
made but I just move the old pyc file out of the way and it seems to get
recreated.  If after doing this you see just one cookie in the debug log
and it *still* doesn't work then you've got a different problem.

Steve

PS: If anybody fancies themselves with Python (which I don't) then they
could easily write a patch which replaces the broken code - ask me and I
can tell you what needs to be done.