On Wed, Jun 25, 2008 at 7:44 PM, Allan Spencer <allan (at) zandahar.net
<mailto: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 <mailto: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 <mailto: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