[Mailman-Users] need help with web interface bug

[Dan Mick]

Dan Simoes wrote:
> 
> I recently switched my site from majordomo to mailman.  Everything has
> been going great, until today, when I noticed that in some cases, users
> cannot change their options through the web interface.
> 
> The error presented is the usual "Bug in Mailman..." and looks like
> others that have been reported here (included below).

It's obvious to everyone that "Bug in Mailman..." is not the error, and that
the traceback particulars are the error, right?

"The OS is patched not to allow hardlinks" is rather-obviously a completely
different problem than "expected string without null bytes, string found".

It looks like you've got a user with no password at all.  I've seen this,
but I don't know how it occurred.  The only fix I found was to manually
adjust the database, using bin/withlist.  This isn't for the faint of heart.
I don't know what caused it and it hasn't recurred, but I suspect bugs in
the handling of "delete users at bounce time" that didn't delete them
altogether, so suspect users that are in your subscribe or bounce log file
as "removed" or "deleted" (forget what it says exactly).

It's possible that if you use bin/remove_member on the addresses which are
supposed to be all gone, things will heal themselves; if not, mail me
privately and I'll walk you through some manual procedures that should
fix up your list database.

> What is odd is that it will work fine for some lists, and not for
> others.
> 
> I would really appreciate some help on this one - I have compared file
> permissions, etc and nothing is looking very obvious, but I am not that
> familiar with the inner workings.
> 
> The only thing I could think of doing was upgrading from beta5 to beta6
> (done, did not fix the problem)

rc1 is the current release; why are you using betas at all?

> and deleting the bad lists and
> recreating them (haven't done that yet).
> 
> Thanks for any pointers, I've already checked the archives back a few
> months.
> 
> | Dan |
> --
> 
> Bug in Mailman version 2.0beta6
> 
> We're sorry, we hit a bug!
> 
> If you would like to help us identify the problem, please email a copy
> of this page to the webmaster for this site with a description of what
> happened. Thanks!
> 
> Traceback:
> 
> Traceback (innermost last):
>   File "/home/mailman/scripts/driver", line 96, in run_main
>     main()
>   File "/home/mailman/Mailman/Cgi/handle_opts.py", line 85, in main
>     process_form(mlist, user, doc)
>   File "/home/mailman/Mailman/Cgi/handle_opts.py", line 247, in
> process_form
>     mlist.ConfirmUserPassword(user, form['digpw'].value)
>   File "/home/mailman/Mailman/SecurityManager.py", line 155, in
> ConfirmUserPassword
>     if self.ValidAdminPassword(pw):
>   File "/home/mailman/Mailman/SecurityManager.py", line 65, in
> ValidAdminPassword
>     return type(pw) == StringType and \
> TypeError: argument 2: expected string without null bytes, string found
> 
> Python information:
> 
>      Variable
>                                  Value
>  sys.version
>                  1.5.2 (#2, Aug 25 2000, 03:03:24) [GCC 2.8.1]
>  sys.executable
>                  /usr/local/bin/python
>  sys.prefix
>                  /usr/local
>  sys.exec_prefix
>                  /usr/local
>  sys.path
>                  /usr/local
>  sys.platform
>                  sunos5
> 
> Environment variables:
> 
>         Variable
>                                               Value
>  DOCUMENT_ROOT
>                        /files/www/audifans
>  SERVER_ADDR
>                        168.100.186.100
>  HTTP_ACCEPT_ENCODING
>                        gzip
>  CONTENT_LENGTH
>                        143
>  CONTENT_TYPE
>                        application/x-www-form-urlencoded
>  PATH_TRANSLATED
>                        /files/www/audifans/v8/dans at audifans.com
>  REMOTE_ADDR
>                        63.69.130.254
>  SERVER_SOFTWARE
>                        Apache/1.3.14 (Unix) PHP/4.0.3pl1
>  GATEWAY_INTERFACE
>                        CGI/1.1
>  UNIQUE_ID
>                        OgnLxqhkumQAAAH8VEg
>  HTTP_ACCEPT_LANGUAGE
>                        en
>  REMOTE_PORT
>                        46017
>  SERVER_PORT
>                        80
>  TZ
>                        US/Eastern
>  HTTP_USER_AGENT
>                        Mozilla/4.76 [en] (Windows NT 5.0; U)
>  HTTP_ACCEPT_CHARSET
>                        iso-8859-1,*,utf-8
>  HTTP_ACCEPT
>                        image/gif, image/x-xbitmap, image/jpeg,
> image/pjpeg, image/png, */*
>  REQUEST_URI
>                        /mailman/handle_opts/v8/dans at audifans.com
>  PATH
>                        /usr/sbin:/usr/bin
>  QUERY_STRING
>  SERVER_PROTOCOL
>                        HTTP/1.0
>  PATH_INFO
>                        /v8/dans at audifans.com
>  HTTP_HOST
>                        www.audifans.com
>  REQUEST_METHOD
>                        POST
>  SERVER_SIGNATURE
>                        Apache/1.3.14 Server at www.audifans.com Port 80
>  SCRIPT_NAME
>                        /mailman/handle_opts
>  SERVER_ADMIN
>                        dans at audifans.com
>  SCRIPT_FILENAME
>                        /home/mailman/cgi-bin/handle_opts
>  PYTHONPATH
>                        /home/mailman
>  HTTP_REFERER
>                        http://www.audifans.com/mailman/subscribe/v8
>  SERVER_NAME
>                        www.audifans.com
>  HTTP_CONNECTION
>                        Keep-Alive
> 
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