The Boston Diaries

The ongoing saga of a programmer who doesn't live in Boston, nor does he even like Boston, but yet named his weblog/journal “The Boston Diaries.”

Go figure.

Thursday, February 09, 2006

Debugging other people's code

I understand why Smirk wants this, I thought to myself, but I still don't like them.

I was neck deep in PHP and shell scripts, trying to figure out what the heck Ravencore (a control panel—sigh) was doing when configuring the IMAP and POP servers. You see, the IMAP and POP servers weren't authenticating the users—or rather, they were, but for some reason were not authenticating against the passwords set for the users.

It took a good half hour or so to track the problem down to a shell script that regenerated the password file for the IMAP and POP servers. The script generated the following from MySQL:

4:testuser:example.net:true::guessme

Six fields, separated by colons—and if you look closely, you'll notice that one of the fields is empty. Keep that in mind, it's an important point. Then it was doing the following:

# separate the string into a temp variable so we don't
# have to make several calls to to the sed command

    tmp=$(echo $i | sed 's/:/ /g')

    mid=$(echo $tmp | awk '{print $1}')
    mail_name=$(echo $tmp | awk '{print $2}')
    domain_name=$(echo $tmp | awk '{print $3}')
    mailbox=$(echo $tmp | awk '{print $4}')
    spam_folder=$(echo $tmp | awk '{print $5}')
    mail_pass=$(echo $tmp | awk '{print $6}')

    email_addr="$mail_name@$domain_name"

The problem?

The first line, the one that calls sed to remove the colons. It transforms the line from MySQL to:

4 testuser example.net true guessme

So there's only five fields instead of six! So the password was being set to nothing (there is no spoon sixth field).

The fix was simple:

        mid=$(echo $i | cut -d: -f1)
        mail_name=$(echo $i | cut -d: -f2)
        domain_name=$(echo $i | cut -d: -f3)
        mailbox=$(echo $i | cut -d: -f4)
        spam_folder=$(echo $i | cut -d: -f5)
        mail_pass=$(echo $i | cut -d: -f6)

Have I mentioned that I hate control panels?

Obligatory Picture

[The future's so bright, I gotta wear shades]

Obligatory Contact Info

Obligatory Feeds

Obligatory Links

Obligatory Miscellaneous

You have my permission to link freely to any entry here. Go ahead, I won't bite. I promise.

The dates are the permanent links to that day's entries (or entry, if there is only one entry). The titles are the permanent links to that entry only. The format for the links are simple: Start with the base link for this site: https://boston.conman.org/, then add the date you are interested in, say 2000/08/01, so that would make the final URL:

https://boston.conman.org/2000/08/01

You can also specify the entire month by leaving off the day portion. You can even select an arbitrary portion of time.

You may also note subtle shading of the links and that's intentional: the “closer” the link is (relative to the page) the “brighter” it appears. It's an experiment in using color shading to denote the distance a link is from here. If you don't notice it, don't worry; it's not all that important.

It is assumed that every brand name, slogan, corporate name, symbol, design element, et cetera mentioned in these pages is a protected and/or trademarked entity, the sole property of its owner(s), and acknowledgement of this status is implied.

Copyright © 1999-2024 by Sean Conner. All Rights Reserved.