[Pkg-sympa-devel] Bug#836785: sympa: wws outputs the right webpage, but into /var/log/apache2/errors.log

Mon Sep 5 17:32:23 UTC 2016

Package: sympa
Version: 6.1.25~dfsg-1
Severity: important

Dear Maintainer,

I installed the last version of sympa two times:

- once on www.lyceejeanbart.fr, and it rendered the web service
  http://www.lyceejeanbart.fr/wws unusable. I echanged some private
  e-mails with Emmanuel Bouthenot about it, but we could not find
  a solution to the bug.

- then on www.freeduc.org, and it rendered the web service
  http://www.freeduc.org/wws unusable, with exactly the same
  misbehavior.

When I try to access either http://www.lyceejeanbart.fr/wws
or http://www.freeduc.org/wws, I get an error 500 "Internal
Server Error"

Here is a typical excerpt of the last lines in /var/log/apache2/error.log
just after the access:

--------------------8<---------------------------
Set-Cookie: sympa_session=6de874a22d61d58efc1d990d706656b8ee; path=/; HttpOnly
Date: Mon, 05 Sep 2016 17:01:53 GMT
Cache-control: max-age=0
Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8
X-UA-Compatible: IE=100

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?><!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML
1.0 Transitional//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html lang="en" xml:lang="en" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">

<!-- $Id: main.tt2 10054 2013-12-24 14:30:11Z sikeda $ -->
<head>
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
<meta name="generator" content="Sympa" />

<title> Mailing lists service - home </title>

 ......
 ...... MANY LINES ERASED HERE
 ......

</div> <!-- end div canvas -->

  <!-- $Id: footer.tt2 8454 2013-01-18 16:08:17Z sympa-authors $ -->
<div class="clearfooter"> </div>

<div id="Footer">

<img src="/static-sympa/icons/favicon_sympa.png" width="20px" height="20px"/>

<a href="http://www.sympa.org"> Powered by Sympa </a>

</div>
<!-- end footer.tt2 -->

</body>
<!-- end main.tt2 -->
</html>
--------------------8<---------------------------

As this bug occured in two web servers which I am maintaining,
I presume that it can be considered as reproducible, even if
Emmanuel wrote me that he did not find the same buggy behavior
with another server which he maintains.

== OTHERS INDICATIONS ==

I could check that the line "use_fast_cgi  1" was erased from
/etc/sympa/sympa.conf during the post-install of the package;
so I added this line by hand, and made a "service sympa restart".

Even when I restart sequentially apache2 and sympa, the error 500
remains.

== AFTERTHOUGHTS ==

The fast cgi script ouputs the right webpage, so I can imagine that
there is probably no bug at all inside the script's source, except one:
it does the work, but does not take care of the status flag at the end
of the process, so the output goes to "error.log" rather than going into
apache2's standard output.

It is just a wild guess; you should probably forget it.

== MITIGATION ==

The base sympa service still functions. The only consequence of the bug
is to render the web user interface unreachable.

-- System Information:
Debian Release: stretch/sid
  APT prefers stable
  APT policy: (500, 'stable'), (499, 'testing')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)

Kernel: Linux 4.6.0-1-amd64 (SMP w/4 CPU cores)
Locale: LANG=fr_FR.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=fr_FR.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash
Init: systemd (via /run/systemd/system)