263204 - MailNews should parse error message the right way until 200/201 from newsserver is sent

Status: VERIFIED FIXED

(MailNews Core :: Networking: NNTP, defect)

Description

[Frank Wein [:mcsmurf]]

When you connect to a newsserver, which does for some reasons not accept any new
connections (meaning: doesn't send the initial 200/201 response after connecting
to the server), Mozilla should
a) not cut off the first four character in the error message because it assumes
that a status code is sent in first place
and/or
b) display a generic error message that the server didn't accept the connection
for some unknown reason.

Comment 1

[Christian Eyrich]

Not cutting off the first chars would be easy.
Question is, if we really should display an own error message since we don't
really know the reason for the problem. Or is the response without code defined
anywhere?

If you know such a server, what's sent as greeting, nothing (CRLF) or a special
text?

Comment 2

[Frank Wein [:mcsmurf]]

(In reply to comment #1)
> Not cutting off the first chars would be easy.
> Question is, if we really should display an own error message since we don't
> really know the reason for the problem. Or is the response without code defined
> anywhere?

No, isn't defined AFAIK.

> If you know such a server, what's sent as greeting, nothing (CRLF) or a special
> text?

Well, you can force such a behaviour with Hamster if you limit the count of
concurrent connections. There has also been a discussion if this a bug in
Hamster or Mozilla (where all details of this bug are noted), if you want to
read it, see
http://groups.google.de/groups?hl=en&lr=&threadm=ck8f99.m4.1%40kolos.joernweber.de&prev=/groups%3Fhl%3Den%26lr%3D%26group%3Dhamster.de.misc
Here the problem is, the server accepts the TCP connection, sends just
"Connection limit reached - try again later." and closes the connection again.

Comment 3

[Christian Eyrich]

Attachment: proposed patch

The patch only crops the first chars if the server string starts with a number
and is at least 4 chars long.
This provides the user with the whole server string and also fixes a potential
problem if the server answer is less than 4 bytes.

Comment 4

[Frank Wein [:mcsmurf]]

V. with a current cvs trunk build