Xref: utzoo news.admin:2207 news.sysadmin:683 comp.mail.uucp:1313 Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!tektronix!orca!tekecs!Zaephod!darylm From: darylm@Zaephod.gwd.tek.com (Daryl V. McDaniel) Newsgroups: news.admin,news.sysadmin,comp.mail.uucp Subject: Re: Very odd control message causes news failure, uuxqt queue hang. Summary: may also be rmail's fault Message-ID: <10000@tekecs.TEK.COM> Date: 17 May 88 15:12:40 GMT References: <4578@hoptoad.uucp> Sender: nobody@tekecs.TEK.COM Reply-To: darylm@illian.UUCP (Daryl V. McDaniel) Organization: Micronetics, Aloha, Oregon Lines: 37 In article <4578@hoptoad.uucp> gnu@hoptoad.uucp (John Gilmore) writes: >This news article showed up today on hoptoad, causing a failure when C >news tried to mail a reply to the address in the Path: line (because >mail uses uux, and Sun's uux can't handle long command lines due to >statically allocated buffers): ... deleted stuff ... >... Here's what it looked like on hoptoad: > > U daemon utzoo > F D.hoptoadB5d75 > I D.hoptoadB5d75 > C rmail pacbell!ames!ncar!oddjob!nosuch!sitesas!these!madeup!namesin!hereexist!ijust!addedthem!tomakethe!pathline!aslongas!theonein!theother!testmessage!thatisent!atthesame!timeas!thisone!iamsure!youseewhy!oddjob.uchicago.edu!bbtest1 ... deleted stuff ... > John Gilmore >-- >John Gilmore {sun,pacbell,uunet,pyramid,ihnp4}!hoptoad!gnu gnu@toad.com >"Use the Source, Luke...." While I still worked for Tektronix I discovered a similar problem receiving mail from mailing lists. Whenever I would receive mail originating from certain sites, there would be a core dump in XTMP. Further analysis showed that rmail was failing with a "segmentation violation". I looked at the rmail sources (thank goodness they are quite small) and noticed that almost all temporary variables are statically allocated arrays. The array that the path was reconstructed in was char[64]. There was another array that would never contain a value other than "From:" or ">From:" what was allocated as char[1024]. The RCS logs indicated that this had not been changed from the way it was received from Berkeley. After I changed the char[64] to a char[1024] (I also changed the other array to char[8]) I have had no further problems. -_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_ Daryl V. McDaniel (503) 224-7056 Micronetics, Aloha Research Group 4730 S.W. 182nd Ave. ...tektronix!nosun!illian!darylm Aloha, Oregon 97007 WUI Telex: 6972206