[Popcon-developers] Bug#240603: popularity-contest: Error messages shows up during cron.weekly task

[Bill Allombert]

On Sun, Mar 28, 2004 at 09:51:43AM +0200, Christian Perrier wrote:
> Package: popularity-contest
> Version: 1.15
> Severity: normal
> 
> /etc/cron.weekly/popularity-contest:
> Error: MY_HOSTID does not match ^([a-f0-9]{32})$
> Please edit /etc/popularity-contest.conf to use a valid md5sum value
> 
> This showed up suddenly this week...while popcon runs on my system for ages...
> 
> My /etc/popularity-contest file:
> 
> MY_HOSTID="ad6650b9e6c995fc986328890bbb2e09  -"

Oh well, 
You have been affected by the md5sum breakage.
md5sum has changed behaviour some time ago when data come from stdin.
Now it output a trailing "-". popularity-contest postinst is now fixed
to discard it but some versions created bogus MY_HOSTID like the above.

Only by chance they were handled sanely by the popcon server.
I would suggest you to fix MY_HOSTID to read

MY_HOSTID="ad6650b9e6c995fc986328890bbb2e09"

(or generate a new random MY_HOSTID, since they are supposed to be kept
secret, and this one is no more :)

I can change the test to allow for that oddball case, though maybe
sanitizing MY_HOSTID in postinst can be a superior option.

Cheers,
-- 
Bill. <ballombe@debian.org>

Imagine a large red swirl here.