Question

I have a simple xmlrpc server setup to start a SMTP server, the code is here:

from SimpleXMLRPCServer import SimpleXMLRPCServer
import smtplib

# Create server
server = SimpleXMLRPCServer(("localhost", 1025), allow_none = True)

# add the introspection functions (system.listMethods, system.methodHelp 
# and system.methodSignature)
server.register_introspection_functions()

def send(host, port):
    server = smtplib.SMTP((host, port), None)

# register this method
server.register_function(send, 'send')

# start server
server.serve_forever()

I start this server and on the client side I perform the following steps:

import xmlrpclib
s = xmlrpclib.ServerProxy('http://localhost:1025')
s.send('0.0.0.0',25)

which result in the following error I do not understand:

xmlrpclib.Fault: <Fault 1: "<type 'exceptions.AttributeError'>:'tuple' object has no attribute 'find'">

What tuple object is meant here? Why does the code require an attribute find? Any ideas that help me to get this code working, i.e. that I am able to make a xmlrpc request to initialize (and later use) a smtp server inside the xmlrpc server?

Thanks
Alex

Answer 1

In the smtplib documentation it’s stated the the signature of the SMTP class accepts two distinct parameters for host and port.

Thus you should define your send function in this way:

def send(host, port):
    server = smtplib.SMTP(host, port)

Probably the SMTP constructor expects a string as host, and uses the find method.
But if you pass in the tuple (host, port) then that AttributeError is generated.