nsb@THUMPER.BELLCORE.COM (Nathaniel Borenstein) (05/20/91)
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...
tom@ICASE.EDU (Tom Crockett) (05/21/91)
Excerpts from internet.info-andrew: 20-May-91 Warning: Nasty AMS Bug Nathaniel Borenstein@thu (1402) > Amazing, really, that it would appear that no such header was previously > encountered by any of the AMS-based bboard systems. Actually, I think I may have seen this once before (cui in an infinite loop), but I didn't realize that's what the problem was. We, too, were hit by the bad message to xpert. I finally got cui to proceed by deleting messages from my bboard account's Mailbox directory until I found the offending one. Not a pretty sight! Tom Crockett ICASE Institute for Computer Applications in Science and Engineering M.S. 132C e-mail: tom@icase.edu NASA Langley Research Center phone: (804) 864-2182 Hampton, VA 23665-5225