Package: logwatch
Version: 7.4.3+git20161207-2
Severity: important
Tags: newcomer
Dear Maintainer,
* What led up to the situation?
logwatch was examining logs after I had installed a lot of
iptables system logging to see whether my firewall was working while I
poked from outside.
It tried to send a line in the report that was very long - 2048
characters or so. It linewrapped this line down somewhat randomly
adding ! to the end of the line to show this and one of the lines
was 1040 characters long.
However, exim4 has a line length check and refuses to send mail
which it gets from SMTP with lines longer than 998 octets. It fails to
send the mail somewhat incomprehensively with the error message that I
include in the
title of this report. Lines longer than 998 are apparently
prohibited by the standard.
The user gets a bounce message which is completely enigmatic and
gives no real hint what the problem is. (The exim4 config script
admits that what is done there is a hack).
* What exactly did you do (or not do) that was effective (or
ineffective)?
First, while trying to find out what was happening, I disabled
the line length restriction in exim4 (having first found out how
to do this). This worked and allowed me to get the mail - and the sample
lines below.
Alternative and better solution: I added --encode=base64 to
00logwatch in cron.daily, after ensuring that libmime-tools-perl
was installed. Line wrapping is no longer a problem.
* What was the outcome of this action?
Both solutions worked and allowed the mail to be sent.
I think that logwatch should be distributed with --encode=base64
selected to avoid this problem.
section from log that logwatch tried to send
This is linewrapped as it came out of logwatch. Perhaps the line
wrapping code should be improved? However my first attempt to send this fell
over the
same linelength restriction in exim4. So I've base64'd the source lines.
- cut and run base64 -d file --
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MTEsMTEzLDExOSwxMjUsMTM1LDEzOSwxNDMsMTQ2LDE2MSwxNjMsMTc5LDE5OSwyMTEsMjEyLDIy
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