The mailing list for users of the eduroam Configuration Assistant Tool (CAT)

[Stefan Winter <address@concealed>]

Hello all,

I'm happy to confirm that we have found the issue and corrected it yesterday evening. You should now not be seeing any erratic language changes any more, neither in installers nor in the user interface.

We have also cleared the installer cache so that the bogus ones are not served any more.

For those interested in the technical detail: we set the desired user language in PHP via a call to the putenv() function, which sets an environment variable LC_ALL for the current request.

LC_ALL is supposed to do this change only for the user request in question. However, the function putenv() is not thread-safe.

The optimisations we did at the start of semester included changing the web server's request handling model from "worker" to "event". The former uses a different *process* for each request, the latter bundles incoming requests in *threads*.

With putenv() not being thread-safe, this change meant that language settings were now applied to many/all concurrent requests, so the language preference of one user was applied to everyone else getting served a page at the same moment in time. That led to a random mix of languages in high traffic situations - but everything appeared to work fine under lab conditions in dev and testing, because there was no concurrency.

The LC_ALL (language) setting is the only thing that our codebase sets using putenv() so nothing except the language while serving a page was affected by this.

We have reverted back to the "worker" model, which fixed the issue. I'm glad that this spook is over now. And on the upside, we've all learned new languages for a while :-)

Greetings,

Stefan Winter

Am 14.11.19 um 13:53 schrieb Daniele Albrizio:

Just a note that might speedup debugging. The message in the screenshot is in Italian, not Spanish.

Il gio 14 nov 2019, 11:50 Jonas Gawe <address@concealed> ha scritto:

Hi all,

 

We have encountered an unusual error in which the cat.eduroam.org site as well as the W10 Eduroam CAT installer will, without prompt or clear reason, change into the Spanish language. On the website it is easy to revert the language back to English by selecting your desired language again but with the installer, there are error messages and installation prompts that appear in Spanish and cannot be changed or easily highlighted for translation.

 

Could anyone take a look at this?

When attempting to run the W10 installation file (profile is University of Oxford) I get the error below – it’s notifying me that I do not have a wireless card (which is normal given that I work on an office desktop) but it’s in Spanish for some reason.

 

Kind regards,

 

Jonas Gawe
Service Desk – Customer Support  Team 
IT Services, University of Oxford.

Dartington House, University Offices.

Wellington Square, Oxford

OX1 2JD.

T: 01865 612345 

Systems’ Status   http://www.it.ox.ac.uk/status

Web: http://help.it.ox.ac.uk/help/index    

Email: address@concealed

 

 

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