jbuck@epicen.UUCP (Joe Buck) (10/09/85)
Despite the statement to the contrary that is regularly posted to
net.announce.newusers, the line-eater bug is alive and well -- and it
may be on your system, mutilating your postings and those of others
that pass through your site. There's no real excuse for this; the
bug has been around for a long time; it exists in an obsolete version
of netnews. It's time to be rid of the bug once and for all, and since
the net.gods haven't acted, I, a lowly leaf site administrator (well,
we do feed someone ba.all), will try.
First, if you obtained news from a 4.2bsd distribution tape, and you
haven't installed any patches to it, it's almost certain that you have
the bug (unless you got the tape fairly recently).
If you're not certain where your news source came from, check to see
if you're running 2.10.1 news. To see the version, check the "Relay-Version"
header on this message. If it's 2.10.1, you may have the bug. Here's how
to check:
Post a message to a local group on your own machine (say "general") that
has the following properties:
1. On the first line of the message body, begin the line with a space or tab.
2. Make sure the message body has more that 1024 characters.
If you have the line eater bug, the first 1024 characters (it might be 512:
I think the number is determined by BUFSIZ) of the message body will vanish.
This is because the first buffer containing the message body is lost. So
the bug is misnamed; a lot more than one line is eaten.
What to do if you have it? Why, update to the current version of news,
of course (and if possible). Post a request asking for the sources;
quite likely your neighbors will be happy to get you to stop munging
their news. If it isn't possible, perhaps one of the old timers knows
what needs to be patched.
If you have the bug and are feeding news to others, please 'fess up (fixing
it would be nice too).
--
Joe Buck | Entropic Processing, Inc.
UUCP: {ucbvax,ihnp4}!dual!epicen!jbuck | 10011 N. Foothill Blvd.
ARPA: dual!epicen!jbuck@BERKELEY.ARPA | Cupertino, CA 95014