[Assp-user] A minor glitch

[Matthyw T. <MT...@fl...>]

Good Morning!

First of all, thanks John.  It's early days yet, but ASSP seems to be =
working very well indeed.  My weird Firewall/NAT/ASSP+RH9+Qmail/Novell =
Groupwise concoction is actually running along just fine!  It took some =
doing, and I've documented everything and all.  Watch for a mini-HOWTO =
fairly soon - I'd love to be able to contribute to this excellent project.

Once silly thing I have noticed - It's possible to make the ASSP server =
crash 'n burn if you accidentally enter a typo in a field that takes a =
Perl regex in the web interface.  For example:  in the no-processing mail =
field, I want to use the string "[autoreply]" to avoid adding spammers to =
my whitelist.  I accidentally entered \[autoreply]\ instead of \[autoreply\=
].  The result was not pretty. =3D)  I know firsthand it's annyoing to =
implement having done something similar in Perl myself, but a sanity check =
on the regex's can't hurt.  It's obviously not a pressing issue, but it's =
so easy to make a typo in a long regex.

I was ok when this happened:  I figured out my mistake, and fixing it =
(under linux w/ sysV init anyhow) was as easy as "cd /etc/init.d ; assp =
start" to get the server back up (any settings you changed before hitting =
apply aren't saved if the server crashes here).  The problem is - Imagine =
you're administering the system remotely and go to make a quick change to =
a regex and accidentally enter a typo like I did - you hit apply, and the =
whole system craters.  If working on the system remotely also means that =
you don't have shell access, you'd be stuck!

Oh, and I should also mention my 2c on the SPAM haiku - everyone on my =
network loves it.  I'm seriously thinking of writing a patch for assp.pl =
that would put a random one in each time a confirmation is sent out. =3D)

Thanks!

-Matt