[squid-users] The email notification feature does not work after 10 days

[Tianyin Xu]

btw, I closed the bugzilla case by referring to your reply.

Anyway, since Squid is an open-source project, the users who don't
want the 10-day limit can always comment the if-condition to always
get email notifications.

Thanks!

~t



On Sat, Jan 31, 2015 at 1:25 PM, Tianyin Xu <tixu at cs.ucsd.edu> wrote:
> Dear Amos,
>
> Thanks for the explanation. It's interesting that the 10-day feature is for
> encouraging users to apply the daily released snapshots. I'm never aware of
> this.
>
> Actually, I totally understand the users who are running old stable versions
> (e.g., 3.1.6). They are reluctant to change or have no time to test out the
> new versions as long as the current one works ok. I'm not talking about the
> production uses such as in Baidu and in Flickr where a big team of admins
> watching these servers on a 24*7 basis. The email feature is attractive for
> users like me who uses Squid for non-production scenarios but still requires
> certain level of availability. I think that's why the feature is still there
> for years and I do appreciate it :-)
>
> Thanks again, Amos! Have a great weekend!
>
> Best,
> Tianyin
>
>
> On Sat, Jan 31, 2015 at 2:04 AM, Amos Jeffries <squid3 at treenet.co.nz> wrote:
>>
>> On 31/01/2015 6:41 p.m., Tianyin Xu wrote:
>> > Hi,
>> >
>> > I'm trying to use the email notification feature specified in the
>> > document.
>> > http://www.squid-cache.org/Doc/config/mail_program/
>> > http://www.squid-cache.org/Doc/config/cache_mgr/
>> > http://www.squid-cache.org/Doc/config/mail_from/
>> >
>> > Basically, if the Squid proxy server dies, I can receive an email
>> > notification by configuring "mail_program", "cache_mgr", and
>> > "mail_from". This is a very nice feature.
>> >
>> > However, when I start Squid and then intentionally kill Squid by
>> > issuing SEGV, Squid dies without sending any email to me. Diving into
>> > the code, I see that the email notification feature is disabled by the
>> > following if condition,
>> >
>> >     /* src/tools.cc */
>> >     ....
>> >     if (squid_curtime - SQUID_RELEASE_TIME < 864000) {
>> >         /* skip if more than 10 days old */
>> >         if (Config.adminEmail)
>> >             mail_warranty();
>> >
>> >         puts(dead_msg());
>> >     }
>> >
>> > From the comment, it seems that intentionally the feature is disabled
>> > if the current time is latter than 10 days after the release time
>> > (which is my case). This totally makes no sense to me because most
>> > users like me will use this feature after 10 days latter than the
>> > release date...
>> >
>> > Could anyone explain this? I moved the if-condition and the feature does
>> > work.
>> >
>> > I also opened a bugzilla report here,
>> > http://bugs.squid-cache.org/show_bug.cgi?id=4184
>>
>>
>> It is a difficult situation.
>>
>> The 10 day limit is itself a feature designed to reduce spam emails
>> being delivered from production systems which are stuck long-term on
>> "stable" version packages. Often long after the crash being notified
>> about is found and fixed. There are people still running Squid 3.1.6 for
>> example, despite years having passed and numerous crashes having been
>> fixed.
>>
>> Squid auto-restarts after crashes to ensure minimal downtime and user
>> impact. There are also numerous other things that could happen that are
>> only ever logged - that includes the reason for the crash being
>> notified.  So you should have log monitoring in place for production
>> systems anyway which mails you on criteria you are interested in. Making
>> this feature much less interesting for production systems using the
>> formal release for long periods of time.
>>
>>
>> It is much more interesting / useful to hear about crashes in newer code
>> with less production use and testing behind it.
>>
>> The development code and daily snapshots define SQUID_RELEASE_TIME to be
>> squid_curtime so the if-condition always matches and enables the feature
>> for experimental installations.
>>
>> This combined with the fact that the only way to resolve crash
>> conditions is to patch the code and/or build latest release snapshot,
>> means that people who are actually interested in avoiding those type of
>> problem are usually running the snapshot code where the 10-day limit
>> does not apply.
>>
>>
>> Amos
>> _______________________________________________
>> squid-users mailing list
>> squid-users at lists.squid-cache.org
>> http://lists.squid-cache.org/listinfo/squid-users
>
>



-- 
Tianyin XU,
http://cseweb.ucsd.edu/~tixu/