Description of problem: alpine has "phone home" code where on initial use it tries to send a message to <alpine-count.washington.edu>, which does not exist. Various distributions including freebsd and debian strip this code out to avoid this. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): alpine-2.02-3.el5 http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/cvsweb.cgi/ports/mail/alpine/files/patch-newuser?rev=1.1;content-type=text%2Fplain http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=631758
Hello, Thanks for the links to example patches. Obviously UW alpine is dead. From the looks of it, the SF "re-alpine" upstream we've chose to migrate to has stalled (no commits for months). The Debian dsc has the same upstream listed: http://ftp.de.debian.org/debian/pool/main/a/alpine/alpine_2.02+dfsg-2.dsc I strongly prefer to patch upstream when possible, I've messaged the SF maintainer to see if I can get commit access.
alpine-2.03-2.fc18 has been submitted as an update for Fedora 18. https://admin.fedoraproject.org/updates/alpine-2.03-2.fc18
alpine-2.03-2.fc17 has been submitted as an update for Fedora 17. https://admin.fedoraproject.org/updates/alpine-2.03-2.fc17
alpine-2.03-2.el6 has been submitted as an update for Fedora EPEL 6. https://admin.fedoraproject.org/updates/alpine-2.03-2.el6
alpine-2.03-1.el5 has been submitted as an update for Fedora EPEL 5. https://admin.fedoraproject.org/updates/alpine-2.03-1.el5
alpine-2.03-2.fc16 has been submitted as an update for Fedora 16. https://admin.fedoraproject.org/updates/alpine-2.03-2.fc16
Hello, I got upstream commit access and applied the patch used in Debian: http://re-alpine.git.sourceforge.net/git/gitweb.cgi?p=re-alpine/re-alpine;a=summary Updates pushed, please test and provide Karma.
Package alpine-2.03-2.fc18: * should fix your issue, * was pushed to the Fedora 18 testing repository, * should be available at your local mirror within two days. Update it with: # su -c 'yum update --enablerepo=updates-testing alpine-2.03-2.fc18' as soon as you are able to. Please go to the following url: https://admin.fedoraproject.org/updates/FEDORA-2012-20835/alpine-2.03-2.fc18 then log in and leave karma (feedback).
alpine-2.03-2.fc17 has been pushed to the Fedora 17 stable repository. If problems still persist, please make note of it in this bug report.
alpine-2.03-2.fc16 has been pushed to the Fedora 16 stable repository. If problems still persist, please make note of it in this bug report.
alpine-2.03-2.el6 has been pushed to the Fedora EPEL 6 stable repository. If problems still persist, please make note of it in this bug report.
alpine-2.03-1.el5 has been pushed to the Fedora EPEL 5 stable repository. If problems still persist, please make note of it in this bug report.
alpine-2.03-2.fc18 has been pushed to the Fedora 18 stable repository. If problems still persist, please make note of it in this bug report.
This is back now.
We switched upstream, adding chappa@ who's upstream committer. Eduardo, can you disable the code that attempts to send a message to <alpine-count.washington.edu>, which does not exist? The patch 80_remove_phone_home.patch from Debian is here: http://patch-tracker.debian.org/package/alpine/2.10+dfsg-1
(In reply to Joshua Daniel Franklin from comment #15) > Eduardo, can you disable the code that attempts to send a message to > <alpine-count.washington.edu>, which does not exist? It seems to me that what is needed is a new e-mail address to collect this information, rather than remove the code.
OK, feel free to set up a new address.
Hi Eduardo, I took a look at the alpine alpha version at http://patches.freeiz.com/alpine/alpha/release/ Looks like the non-existent "docserver.cac.washington.edu" address is still there: alpine-2.19.3/alpine/send.c:#define PHONE_HOME_VERSION "-count" alpine-2.19.3/alpine/send.c:#define PHONE_HOME_HOST "docserver.cac.washington.edu" alpine-2.19.3/alpine/send.c: snprintf(addr = tmp, sizeof(tmp), "alpine%s@%s", PHONE_HOME_VERSION, PHONE_HOME_HOST); Any luck setting up a new e-mail address?
Thank you Joshua for your interest in solving this issue. I have just established an e-mail address for this purpose, namely alpine-count.com. I will update the next alpha version to include this address. It takes about/(up to) 24 hours for the address to receive mail, but the IMAP access is already working, so I will not test this until tomorrow. From my side, I think the issue is solved. Thank you!
Eduardo: It's not really according to fedora guidelines to allow these kind of trackers/beacons. Is it possible to disable this feature for fedora?
In order to give an adequate answer to this post, would you please let me read the guidelines you are referring to? Thank you.
Paul, You realize the phone home is "opt in" right? The way the feature works is to show a screen the first time a user runs alpine, and allow the user to choose to exit the screen or send a "get counted" email. Cheers, Joshua
Oh. I did not realise that. Than I have no issues with it. Sorry.
(In reply to Paul Wouters from comment #23) > Oh. I did not realise that. Than I have no issues with it. Sorry. Excellent. Everything is set up from my side and working for when this starts to operate. Thank you.
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Fedora 18 changed to end-of-life (EOL) status on 2014-01-14. Fedora 18 is no longer maintained, which means that it will not receive any further security or bug fix updates. As a result we are closing this bug. If you can reproduce this bug against a currently maintained version of Fedora please feel free to reopen this bug against that version. If you are unable to reopen this bug, please file a new report against the current release. If you experience problems, please add a comment to this bug. Thank you for reporting this bug and we are sorry it could not be fixed.
(this issue should have been closed already, so no problem with this getting zapped)
This setting is too subtle (users can too easily acknowledge it by error, given that it's shown to them at version updates; no way to turn it off afterwards), and there is no way for a sysadmin to turn it off systemwide either. Because the hidden outbound tracking email will contain site-specific Received: headers (so telling the public about the location/versions of internal mail servers), it's even a little bit spywareish.
That doesn't change alpine maintainer's opinion that the opt-in here is satisfactory. If you disagree, feel free to escalate to fesco (but please don't re-open this bug, it serves little purpose)