eliaskioni / BadStatusLine

This project seeks to expose a uncaught unexpected exception we bumped into which caused our bulk message system to misbehave.

BadStatusLine

Possible bug

I thought of creating this project to try to show case a small issue that caused our system to misbehave.

Our system heavily relies on Africa's Talking. Any mistake means we are not in business.

Disclaimer

I still consider myself an amateur developer. Kindly forgive my lack of knowledge if what am reporting is wrong, not accurate or irrelevant.

To reproduce what am saying.

Clone this repo BADSTATUSLINE and cd to it's directory.

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It's packaged with docker because I think docker is awesome.

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How to set up

Step 1

docker-compose up

Step 2

In a new terminal -

docker-compose logs -f worker

Step 3

In your browser open this localhost

username:password => guest:guest

In the email I have attached an excel file with around 5000 contacts.

upload it. What it will do is read all the contacts in that excel file and initiate sending of SMS to Africa's Talking

In the terminal listening on worker logs check the logs. The exception is been raised randomly. So be patient and wait for it to be raised.

You will see the exception am talking about.

Partly we failed to catch this because it does not show up while sending single SMSes. But sending bulk at once it showed up.

To understand why i think it might affect other people who fail to realise it early. In the lib.AfricasTalkingGateway.py file. Uncomment the send_message function and comment the send_message function which we have handled the exception.

You will notice if the BadStatusLine is raised. The active thread will fail causing messages not to be sent which is something to worry about.

I think we missed to catch it because your doc's in some place mentions that all gateway exceptions will be handled. Which I think is not true.

Here are some links for people who bumped into the same issue.

BADSTATUSLINE

BADSTATUSLINE