Puppet

After upgrading from 0.24.7 to 0.25.3, I noticed that I was no longer getting tagmail reports. My MTA logs were full of “Error reading SMTP packet” entries, so I started looking at tagmail.rb.

What I found is that tagmail is barfing on calling Time.now.rfc2822():

 smtp.open_message_stream(Puppet[:reportfrom], *emails) do |p|
   p.puts "From: #{Puppet[:reportfrom]}"
   p.puts "Subject: Puppet Report for %s" % self.host
   p.puts "To: " + emails.join(", ")
   p.puts "Date: " + Time.now.rfc2822        <----- NoMethodError here!
   p.puts
   p.puts messages
 end

The problem is that you can call Time.now() without a “require ‘time’” statement, but you can’t call Time.rfc2822() without first requiring the module.

You can see this if you run the following in irb:

>> Time.now
=> Tue Feb 02 15:41:29 -0800 2010
>> Time.now.rfc2822
NoMethodError: undefined method `rfc2822' for Tue Feb 02 15:41:34 -0800 2010:Time
    from (irb):2
>> require 'time'
=> true
>> Time.now.rfc2822
=> "Tue, 02 Feb 2010 15:42:00 -0800"
>> 

Because this happens after a fork(), no error messages are logged.

Adding a “require ‘time’” statement to tagmail.rb resolves this issue.