[hobbit] mailack question

[Ralph Mitchell]

On Wed, Jun 25, 2008 at 7:44 PM, Allan Spencer <allan at zandahar.net> wrote:

> HI all
>
> A LONG time ago I asked about ack'ing an alert via email (or via
> sms-to-email) and to be able to do so without a subject. A patch was written
> at the time and it was included into the main codebase but unfortunately I
> did not get a chance to imeplement what I wanted to and never ended up
> testing it. Thats has just changed recently and now I am having issues
> acking an alert via text in the body.
>
> If i reply to an email and maintain the subject it works fine, if I try cut
> the subject and paste it as the body nothing happens. I havent gone as far
> as testing it via the sms-to-email app yet as I cant get it working from a
> normal email.



The hobbit-mailack.c program loops through the incoming email, looking for
interesting stuff.  Here's where it finds the subject line:

     else if (strncasecmp(STRBUF(inbuf), "subject:", 8) == 0)
         subjectline = strdup(skipwhitespace(STRBUF(inbuf)+8));

Once the headers are done with, it goes on to look for some things in the
email body, such as "delay=" and "ack=":

     else if ((strncasecmp(STRBUF(inbuf), "ack=", 4) == 0) ||
                (strncasecmp(STRBUF(inbuf), "ack ", 4) == 0)) {
                                /* Some systems cannot generate a subject.
Allow them to ack
                                 * via text in the message body. */
                                subjectline = (char *)malloc(1024);
                                snprintf(subjectline, 1023, "Subject: Hobbit
[%s]", STRBUF(inbuf)+4);
                        }

So, does the email body contain a line that starts with "ack=NNNNNN" or "ack
NNNNN"??  If not, it won't match the above code fragment.  It looks like it
should be *just* the number, as that gets filled in between the square
brackets in the faked subject line.

I noticed something else interesting in the code.  The last thing it does is
call sendmessage, handing it a buffer loaded like this:

     p += sprintf(p, "hobbitdack %s %d %s", cookie, duration, firsttxtline);
        if (fromline) {
           p += sprintf(p, "\nAcked by: %s", fromline);
        }

I figured it wouldn't hurt to try doing this:

     server/bin/bb localhost "hobbitdack NNNNNN 60 this thing is broken
     Acked by: me at this.domain.com"

where NNNNNN came from a real, current warning message.  Note the placement
of the double-quotes - there needs to be a newline between the message and
"Acked by".  And now, just below the "Status unchanged in...." message at
the bottom of the page I find this:

          Current acknowledgment: this thing is broken
               Acked by: me at this.domain.com
               Next update at: 12:54 2008-07-09

and there's a nice yellow check mark on the all-non-green page.  So it looks
like an ACK *can* be sent via the command line...

Ralph
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