Comments on: Careful while using Exception Notifier Plugin

By: Hoptoad: An Rails Exception Handling Service | Web On Rails

Hoptoad: An Rails Exception Handling Service | Web On Rails — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 06:02:45 +0000

[...] Many of you guys(as me) may have used Exception Notifier plugin to get Rails app exceptions right into your mailbox, and may also have faced some problem like this. [...]

By: Przemyslaw Wroblewski

Przemyslaw Wroblewski — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 07:32:56 +0000

I’ve faced similar problems back in old php days - I’ve error notification that sends email when problem occurs - same pattern here. Then I’ve workaround too many emails problem using error grouping and my cron script sends 1 email with several errors each 10 minutes.
But since now I’m working on lite traffic sites I haven’t created any solution for rails yet.

By: nicolash

nicolash — Sun, 09 Sep 2007 16:25:16 +0000

hmm, a RoutingError should be treated as 404, so no notification should be triggered…
maybe you have an older version ?

def exceptions_to_treat_as_404
exceptions = [ActiveRecord::RecordNotFound,
ActionController::UnknownController,
ActionController::UnknownAction]
exceptions

By: Akhil Bansal

Akhil Bansal — Thu, 30 Aug 2007 04:47:53 +0000

Thanks Surendra, I’ll look at that

By: Surendra Singhi

Surendra Singhi — Wed, 29 Aug 2007 16:22:10 +0000

i believe you are probably using old version of exception_notification(maybe from old repo) which sends emails on ActionController::RoutingError, the latest trunk version doesn’t do that.

By: Chad

Chad — Tue, 07 Aug 2007 19:03:14 +0000

very nice blog… well done!

By: Alex Satrapa

Alex Satrapa — Fri, 27 Jul 2007 01:51:07 +0000

Another option is to have your notifications sent out-bound through the company’s MSA, and have them do rate-limiting and blacklisting on that MSA. This means that in a DoS situation, you’ll limit the number of outbound messages and prevent further DoS due to the volume of email exiting your network.

By: Pratik

Pratik — Thu, 26 Jul 2007 19:55:24 +0000

On a side note, you might want to add a route like :

map ‘*whatever’, :controller => ’some’, :action => ‘my_custom_not_found’

then in SomeController :

def my_custom_not_found
render :nothing => true, :status => 404
end

Also, it’s not a great idea to have default “map.connect ‘:controller/:action/:id’” route in your production applications. May be you should go RESTful or at least add a regular expression to your default route. Something like :

map.connect ‘:controller/:action/:id’, :controller => /mycontroller1/mycontrolle2/

By: Akhil Bansal

Akhil Bansal — Thu, 26 Jul 2007 18:32:34 +0000

Tim,
I agree with you

By: Tim Case

Tim Case — Thu, 26 Jul 2007 18:11:47 +0000

I’m guessing the big takeaway from this would be just to create a special gmail account for the exception notification plugin then in an extremely unusual circumstance such as a dos attack, you still have access to your regular email?