I've been running trac for a variety of capacities for about a year
and a half now (trying to keep my versions up to date as a I go).

On a recent build I'm running into some issues I've never seen
before.  For now the major issue is a mail loop that caused a blackout
of the head groups email servers, and the secondary issue is speed
problems and my need for pointers on solving them.

For the first issue, it's a combined issue that we've tracked to a
couple of different things that combine caused it to go haywire.

1st, we use the email2trac plugin, we've already submitted a bug
report with them for this.

2nd, the user that emailed us CC'd our email2trac target in their
email, which got placed in the email list starting this vicious cycle

3rd, we have all notifications on, we use the ticket system to track
user requests and trouble tickets for the center where I work.  The
users like receiving feedback without having to login to the trac
system (and they honestly should need to ever look at the actual
tickets unless they are trying to answer a question instead of
submitting a request).

So. out user sent us an email CC'd with ourselves as a target.  The
system did it's thing and generated a responce email saying it had
received it.  Which generated another ticket, twice as large as the
previous one (since it included all of the previous tickets contents)
and so on.

All told by the time we stopped it we were flooded with over 2500 spam
tickets and our trac.db (sqlite3) file had risen to 19 GB in size.  We
also crippled the mail server servicing the user in question and wound
up with our server blacklisted (with good reason).

I've since taken up poking around at the notification system and would
like to simply blacklist either specific email addresses or entire
domains (like say the local domain the email alias we are using is
on).  To this end I've added the domain we wish to block to the
'ignore_domains' flag in the trac.ini file but I'm not clear if this
is actually what I want to be doing.  We also asked the email2trac
devs to add a filter so it doesn't add CC's of it's own alias to the
system but it's unclear if or when such a feature would be
implemented.

Does anyone here have any suggestions (aside from simply not using
email2trac, as that would be a deal breaker) on how to solve this
problem reliably so we can get ourselves off the black list we are on?

After I've solved this problem I'll probably come back to ask about
the speed issues but for quick referrence:
*python is mounted on NFS
*apache 2.2 is built with mod_python
*the trac projects are all run on an sqlite db also mounted over NFS
*the NFS data server is a huge fiber channel based storage system that
has never indicated a problem with speed issues or performance.
*our server is about 5 years old has 2 GB of ram and runs trac
(specifically, and python is a bit slow but not like trac itself.)
slower than my 7-8 year old machine at home with 512 mb of ram by
several orders of magnitude.
*trac is installed un compressed so that I have one less step to deal
with.

--~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Trac 
Users" group.
To post to this group, send email to [email protected]
To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
For more options, visit this group at 
http://groups.google.com/group/trac-users?hl=en
-~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---

Reply via email to