Use Reply, then all attachments corrupted, for a given apache instance (3.0.6)

RT Developers
1

Greetings to the list. I’m working on a fun project involving RT. We’re
already live and have 1500+ tickets including lots of attachments. More on
our project later…

Right now I’m chasing a very confusing bug and this is a plea for help.

The original symptom was that attachments submitted via email were getting
corrupted in the DB. At least, usually they were. Sometimes they would
load OK. The corruption looks like inappropriate charset conversion. I see
this general problem in the list archives, but nobody since around the time
of the 3.0 release.

After hours of experimentation, I think I’ve figured out a reproducible test
case. I’m running apache in single server mode (-X). Once I use the Reply
feature from the web ui (“Response to requestors”), thereafter all new
attachments are corrupted by that apache instance. It doesn’t appear to
matter which ticket I reply to, or which one I create attachments in.
Correspond doesn’t cause the problem (but it doesn’t send mail either,
hmmm…) The attachments are corrupted if they arrive via email or by the
web ui. This could be all wrong but after going down the wrong path many
times this is the best I’ve come up with.

I used to be a mod_perl developer so I’m working my way through the code and
trying to figure it out. Anyone have some clues for me? Areas to check
out? Or is this a known issue?

I’m running 3.0.6 at the moment because it was so easy to install using apt.
I would have already upgraded to the latest but I didn’t see anything in the
changelog or bug database that sounded like the same problem.

Any help would be very much appreciated!

Thanks,

Ethan Tuttle

2

Right now I’m chasing a very confusing bug and this is a plea for help.

The original symptom was that attachments submitted via email were getting
corrupted in the DB. At least, usually they were. Sometimes they would
load OK. The corruption looks like inappropriate charset conversion. I see
this general problem in the list archives, but nobody since around the time
of the 3.0 release.

what version of perl? ISTR that at least one of the attachment
corruption bugs was traced to a slightly older perl version, I know
the mail archives have more details.

seph

3

Thanks for the tip, seph. I was running perl 5.8.2. Because this appeared
to me as an attachment problem, I missed the "5.8.3 charset conversion"
threads when searching the archive.

I upgraded to perl 5.8.3 and RT 3.0.9 from Debian unstable and the problem
appears to be fixed! Maybe the “double conversion” thing was happening, but
in my case only for binary attachments. I did see posts claiming that their
RT would work “for a while” and then start double-converting… kinda
similar to what I was seeing.

Now I’m seeing abysmal page load performance for ticket lists. Probably
just another install problem. It takes around .3 seconds to display each
row in the list! Other pages load OK but slightly slower than my 3.0.6 /
5.8.2 install.

Thanks for the help,

Ethan Tuttle