[LON-CAPA-dev] Hung lond

[Gerd Kortemeyer]

We had a hung lond child on Thursday night.

Good news #1) The new check-up mechanism caught the unresponsive child
and replaced it.

Good news #2) Like last time, the child got hung on an authentication
call. This time, we had the logs record the submitted values. It turns
out that the submitted password was five Null-bytes. Apparently, the
Kerberos authentication routines got hung up on that "password," and
that is why lond stopped responding.


The submission of the null bytes could have been produced by
"Konqueror", a currently unsupported browser for LON-CAPA.

lond has been changed to return "non_authorized" if the password
contains a null byte, and not call Kerberos.

It would be great if somebody who has access to Konqueror could try with
the old lond ON A DEVELOPMENT MACHINE if this indeed hangs lond, and
then see if the new lond solves the problem. If verified, this should be
moved to "STABLE" asap, since - if known to the students - this would be
a great way to avoid homework.