rexec, threads, and ugly crashes

[Danyel Fisher]

mysteries within mysteries!
I started stripping away code to find the absolute
minimum that displays this phenomenon, and wound up
with 35 lines of joy.

For me, if I run this, then open a telnet session,
the code will crash. It won't actually core dump,
but it will complain that the interpreter is not
initialized.

If I change one line--if I set the server to
"serve_forever"--everything works fine. Now,
all that serve_forever DOES is repeatedly call
"handle_request"

This is nonintuitive behvior, to me. What am I
missing?

Danyel

---

import SocketServer

class SMTPServer(SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn, SocketServer.TCPServer):
    def server_bind(self):
        """
        Connects to a server. Pulled off of some web site's info
        on how to ensure that socket can be (re)used.
        """
        import socket
        self.socket.setsockopt(socket.SOL_SOCKET, socket.SO_REUSEADDR, 1)
        SocketServer.TCPServer.server_bind(self)

class SMTPHandler(SocketServer.StreamRequestHandler):
    """
    """
    exec_env = None
    def handle(self):
        print "ok"
        import rexec
        if self.exec_env is None:
            print "ABOUT TO START REXEC INIT"
            exec_env = rexec.RExec()
            print "FINSIHED REXEC INTI"

# MAIN MODULE
if __name__=='__main__':
    # Create an instance of our server class
    port = 1999
    import socket
    server=SMTPServer(('', port), SMTPHandler)
    print "Server initted on port",port

    server.handle_request()
#    server.serve_forever()
    print ">>Stopped."