Path: utzoo!lsuc!mnetor!geac!eric
From: eric@geac.UUCP (Eric Dirks)
Newsgroups: tor.news
Subject: Re: Corruption of local news
Keywords: binary garbage corruption
Message-ID: <6400@geac.UUCP>
Date: 25 Jan 89 01:09:56 GMT
References: <34476@bbn.COM> <1989Jan14.015454.2767@sq.uucp> <3749@attcan.UUCP> <1989Jan16.083615.2874@utzoo.uucp> <4821@mnetor.UUCP>
Reply-To: eric@geac.UUCP (Eric Dirks)
Followup-To: tor.news
Distribution: tor
Organization: Geac Computer Corporation
Lines: 36

In article <4821@mnetor.UUCP> ron@mnetor.UUCP (Ron Miller) writes:
>In article <2874@utzoo.uucp>, henry@utzoo.uucp (Henry Spencer) writes:
>>In article <3749@attcan.UUCP> bob@attcan.UUCP (Bob Kyryliuk) writes:
>>>>The article I checked has Message-Id "<34476@bbn.COM>" and Subject "CALL
>>>>FOR VOTES: proposed newsgroup soc.couples".  It was posted to the following
>>>>8 (!) newsgroups: news.groups, news.misc, soc.misc, soc.motss, soc.singles, 
>>>>soc.men, soc.women, misc.kids, and alt.sex.

>>>>The corruption consists of the insertion of a few bytes of binary garbage
>>>>just below the last header line and before the beginning of the article
>>>>body.
 
  
I think I have fixed the problem (let me know if you spot it again). As far
as I can tell it was a pointer overrun when creating the Xrefs header. This
header is created by inews which appends each cross posted newsgroup name to
the header until all the names are listed (regardless of buffer size!!). This
is only a problem for sites where both SMALL_ADDRESS_SPACE and DOXREFS are 
defined (I guess most sites with SMALL_ADDRESS_SPACE defined do not bother with
the DOXREFS). As a result the only those few articles that are cross posted to 
a large number of groups were affected. I have increased the size of the Xrefs
header so the problem should be fixed, unless someone cross posts to more than
(approx) 19 newsgroups (in that case all sites that do Xref processing will 
have problems). 

  
   Eric

   If it's not working, running it with the diagnostics will make it work fine.



-- 
Eric Dirks 		Geac Computer Corporation, Markham, Ontario
eric@geac
{uunet!mnetor,yunexus,utgpu}!geac!eric