Forum OpenACS Development: Re: Problem with sending out the email-address-verification email for new users (needs a package; exploring.)

What I realized about our exchange while I was looking at things was, at the time I was changing things faster than I was telling you, and I know from the past this can get confusing and makes it hard to know what to suggest. Sorry for that, I'll try to keep you more informed next time you're helping me to look at things.

Along those same lines, I have no idea how catch seemed to be failing, I tested catch on random strings (worked, returned 1), on catch {ds_init} -- which works: before upgrading ds, returned 1, after, returned 0 -- and catch {package require Trf} would return 1 before Trf is installed and 0 afterwards -- as mentioned below, an interaction between return -code error, ad_raise and ad_try occasionally causes information about errors to be lost, and so it also causes messages to become uninformative, but I'm getting ahead of myself.

I continued to look at the mail situation, and mostly the error I was getting announced itself as "Error, ad_raise notfound", and when I wanted to test the mail sending in a tchsh shell -- in order to look at the situation completely free of openacs -- this required me to stop using acs_mail_lite::sendimmediately and to start using smtp::sendmessage, which is not in openacs (it's in tcllib).

When I was building up the call (it required some other stuff, like headers and a mime part to send), I did it in ds/shell, and consequently this showed me reasonably informative errors, which allowed me to fix the problems as they came up, until there was one point where it again showed "Error: ad_raise notfound". When I moved the test (with the setup) to run on the tclsh that was built for naviserv, I actually got an informative result, which I'll get to momentarily.

What I discovered about ad_raise, is it does one simple return statement, it is meant to raise an exceptional condition, to be caught by ad_try. It does something like return -code error -errorcode [list this is an exception $exception_name] and my belief is that when the smtp::sendmessage also returns an error code, it gets caught by the request processor as if it were one of these exceptions and partly because of that, some details about the actual error is either lost, or just not reported properly. I don't have complete details yet on exactly what happens,

Lastly, when I try to run smtp::sendmessage in the tclsh shell, the precise code I'm running is:

package require mime

set part [mime::initialize -canonical text/plain -string hi]

package require smtp

smtp::sendmessage \
    $part \
    -originator mailto:jim@jam.sessionsnet.org \
    -recipients mailto:dev1@jam.sessionsnet.org \
    -header {message-id mailto:9123@jam.sessionsnet.org} \
    -header {date {Thu Apr  3 01:42:29 PDT 2014}}

And as I'm typing each separate command, I can observe that all but the last return no errors. The error returned by the last one (the smtp::sendmessage command) is:

421: 4.3.0 collect: Cannot write ./dfs338xUr4013746 (bfcommit, uid=0, gid=104): No such file or directory

This message is an improvement in how informative it is, and I have no idea what parts of it mean, I see it's running as root, I don't know what "collect" is, and I have no idea how a write to a file in . can fail with file/dir not found.

-Jim

I think the catch not catching is due to flooding a sequence of catches with errors. I've been searching for a reference about this without success.

I believe I ran into the problem once due to a permissions issue, where I inadvertently changed the permission of a file that nsd had previously checked permission on and was accessing or writing to but subsequently the OS denied. nsd then spun with high CPU and diagnosing was difficult because catch didn't work as expected.

So, if Gustaf hasn't identified the exact issue, I do believe he is on to a central cause, namely that a file permission has changed for nsd, perhaps a lib file.

cheers,

Initial test on my changes to acs_mail_lite::sendimmediately show it needs more work. On that now, results coming soon.

-Jim

The diff:

--- cut here ---
diff -Naur /home/mu-new/openacs-5.8.0/packages/acs-mail-lite//tcl/acs-mail-lite-procs.tcl acs-mail-lite//tcl/acs-mail-lite-procs.tcl
--- /home/mu-new/openacs-5.8.0/packages/acs-mail-lite//tcl/acs-mail-lite-procs.tcl      2013-08-29 02:53:44.000000000 +0400
+++ acs-mail-lite//tcl/acs-mail-lite-procs.tcl  2014-04-04 14:38:06.000000000 +0400
@@ -141,7 +141,16 @@
        foreach header $headers {
            append cmd_string " -header {$header}"
        }
-        append cmd_string " -servers $smtp -ports $smtpport -username $smtpuser -password $smtppassword"
+        append cmd_string " -servers $smtp -ports $smtpport"
+
+      set smtppass_p [expr {$smtppassword ne ""}]
+      set smtpuser_p [expr {$smtpuser ne ""}]
+
+      # change the condition as you like: right now, both user and pass must be set to use auth.
+      if { $smtpuser_p && $smtppass_p } {
+          append cmd_string " -username $smtpuser -password $smtppassword"
+      }
+
        ns_log Debug "send cmd_string: $cmd_string"
        eval $cmd_string
    }
--- cut here ---

-Jim

Can anyone confirm that in openacs-5.8 it's having the user wait for the verification email?

-Jim