Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!crdgw1!uakari.primate.wisc.edu!caen!uwm.edu!linac!att!ucbvax!THUMPER.BELLCORE.COM!nsb From: nsb@THUMPER.BELLCORE.COM (Nathaniel Borenstein) Newsgroups: comp.soft-sys.andrew Subject: Warning: Nasty AMS Bug Message-ID: Date: 20 May 91 13:41:17 GMT Sender: daemon@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU Organization: The Internet Lines: 30 A long-dormant AMS bug hit us over the weekend, crippling our entire AMS bboard system until I came in this morning and sorted it out. I'm sending this bug to a number of people & lists because the bug was tickled by a mal-formed message that appeared on the "xpert" mailing list, which is received by a number of other sites. Therefore it is possible that other people are equally wedged, and I wanted to warn AMS bboard system maintainers about the problem as quickly as possible. The bug is caused by a badly-malformed "Date" header. The message in question had the following: Date: Fri, 17 May 91 13:56:47 (Ti Apparently that date causes the date parsing routines to go into an infinite loop! You can test this by running cui and typing whenis Fri, 17 May 91 13:56:47 (Ti On both sun3 and sun4 platforms, this seems to cause an infinite loop. I will try to follow up with a patch before too long, but I wanted to get this warning out quickly. If your bboard system is similarly stuck, you can probably fix the bug by killing & restarting your cui daemon after either eliminating the offending message or adding a trailing right paren to its date header. Amazing, really, that it would appear that no such header was previously encountered by any of the AMS-based bboard systems. Of course, the header is totally out of spec, but cui should be able to tolerate it better than that...