error_log gets 'Bad Request Line "^W^C^A" from M.N.O.P

John A. Murdie john at cs.york.ac.uk
Wed Aug 12 09:30:09 PDT 2009


I've never got to the cause of an apparently spurious error ('E') message which reoccurs to fill our Linux CUPS server's error_log. An example of the message looks like this:

E [12/Aug/2009:16:57:24 +0100] Bad request line "^W^C^A" from M.N.O.P!

where 'M.N.O.P' is the address of each of our Linux CUPS clients in turn, at least one such error message per request. It's annoying, because the flood of such error messages occasionally tends to hide error messages caused by serious problems.

We're not the only site that has this problem; here are two more reports of the same thing:

http://groups.google.com/group/linux.debian.bugs.dist/browse_thread/thread/ba69076a62913313
http://www.linuxforen.de/forums/showthread.php?p=1714325

(except that they apparently see "^V^C^A" rather than "^W^C^A"!).

There are further reports of similar apparent corruptions, with different garbage in place of the "^V^C^A".

No-one seems to have a resolution for this. I can't find anything in the General forum here, or in the Bugs list other than STR #648 and STR #719, which are apparently fixed - and probably aren't the same thing anyway.

I'm configuring the CUPS 1.3.11 server with:

./configure --enable-gssapi --enable-ssl --disable-cdsassl --disable-gnutls --enable-openssl

and linking it with 0.9.8h. The client CUPS systems have 1.3.10 still, and get configured with (someone other than myself did this) - same version of openssl involved:

./configure --enable-ssl --enable-openssl=yes --enable-gnutls=no --enable-cdsassl=no \
  --docdir=/usr/doc --without-php --enable-krb5

(Some slight difference of opinion there!)

Any ideas?

John A. Murdie




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