[Popcon-developers] Bug#379732: popularity-contest: Fails to upload using http

Thu Jul 27 13:23:31 UTC 2006

>I am unable to reproduce this.  When I visit the HTTP submit URL, it
>seem to work as it should (this is the expected output when not using
>the popcon script to submit reports):

I get the same when I use a web broswer:

http://popcon.debian.org/cgi-bin/popcon.cgi

GET /cgi-bin/popcon.cgi HTTP/1.1

Host: popcon.debian.org

User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-GB; rv:1.8.0.4) 
Gecko/20060506 Firefox/1.5.0.4 (Debian-1.5.dfsg+1.5.0.4-3)

Accept: 
text/xml,application/xml,application/xhtml+xml,text/html;q=0.9,text/plain;q=0.8,image/png,*/*;q=0.5

Accept-Language: en-gb,en;q=0.5

Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate

Accept-Charset: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7

Keep-Alive: 300

Connection: keep-alive

HTTP/1.x 200 OK

Date: Thu, 27 Jul 2006 12:32:40 GMT

Server: Apache/1.3.33 (Debian GNU/Linux) PHP/4.3.10-16 DAV/1.0.3

Transfer-Encoding: chunked

Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8

Via: 1.1 Application and Content Networking System Software 5.3.5

Connection: Keep-Alive

Debian Popularity-Contest HTTP-POST submission URL
Visit http://popcon.debian.org/ for more info.

>I also tried to submit a new report from my laptop, and this did not
>give any errors to syslog, which it should if it failed to get the
>proper reply from the HTTP server.
>
>   # /etc/cron.weekly/popularity-contest
>   # grep popularity-contest /var/log/messages
>   #

I get "kronos popularity-contest: unable to submit report to 
http://popcon.debian.org/cgi-bin/popcon.cgi." in the log

>Are you still seeing the problem?  If so, I suggest checking for HTTP
>proxies between your machine and popcon.debian.org.

Yep, still getting it everytime. I don't know if there is a transparent 
proxy here at work, I'm not aware of one, and if there is it shouldn't 
interfering with sumbitting data. I've now tested some other debian boxes 
here and sometimes they are able to sumbit ok, but not always.

For example on another box I saw this:

Failed to upload, answer 'HTTP/1.1 400 Bad Request
Date: Thu, 27 Jul 2006 12:44:53 GMT
Server: Apache/1.3.33 (Debian GNU/Linux) PHP/4.3.10-16 DAV/1.0.3
Connection: close
Content-Type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//IETF//DTD HTML 2.0//EN">
<HTML><HEAD>
<TITLE>400 Bad Request</TITLE>
</HEAD><BODY>
<H1>Bad Request</H1>
Your browser sent a request that this server could not understand.<P>
The request line contained invalid characters following the protocol 
string.<P>
<P>
<HR>
<ADDRESS>Apache/1.3.33 Server at gluck.debian.org Port 80</ADDRESS>
</BODY></HTML>
'

Not sure how this could happen. The error is coming back from gluck because 
it obviously doesn't understand the header enough to realise which virtual 
host it was even aimed at, which does suggest that it's getting damaged in 
transit, or maybe before actually being sent.

I tried adding the -C option to the uploader and now the box that couldn't 
send before is able to send fine everytime, and the box that could send 
sometimes, now always fails with answer = "";

Any suggestions on how to debug this?

Richard.