Re: Popularity contest files in /var/log

[Andy Smith <andy@strugglers.net>]

Hi Bruno,

On Tue, Oct 29, 2024 at 11:03:04AM -0300, Bruno Schneider wrote:
> I don't see why HTTP submissions would fail.

You can't conceive of how a TCP connection over the Internet to a remote
server managed by someone else could fail? This speaks to a lack of
imagination I'm afraid. 😀

> I don't know how else I could look into why popularity-contest
> consistently fails.

If I were you I'd be looking at how often it fails compared to how often
it is run. Are there files left behind in /var/log for every invocation
for example.

I'd probably also try running it manually to see what happens.

According to /etc/cron.daily/popularity-contest this runs
"/etc/cron.daily/popularity-contest --crond" every day, and that is a
shell script. You can try just running it as root, i.e.

# /etc/cron.daily/popularity-contest --crond

and for even more info you can try running it with "bash -x" i.e.

# bash -x /etc/cron.daily/popularity-contest --crond

I can see in that script that it does log something on failure to HTTP
POST:

# try to post the report through http POST
if [ "$SUBMITURLS" ] && [ "yes" = "$USEHTTP" ]; then
    for URL in $SUBMITURLS ; do
        if setsid $TORIFY /usr/share/popularity-contest/popcon-upload \
            -u $URL -f $POPCON 2>/dev/null ; then
                SUBMITTED=yes
                set_sub
        else
                logger -t popularity-contest "unable to submit report to $URL."
        fi
    done
fi

So it'd be interesting to know if it is logging that or if the failure
is elsewhere.

If failure is intermittent this is going to be a lot more difficult. For
what it's worth, some of my servers have had occasional problems
submitting popcon and I just write that off as Debian popcon server
being down for maintenance or some other connectivity issue mid way.

Thanks,
Andy

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