I (scott@dsg.tandem.com) wrote:
>Is anyone else seeing this?
>work% ping netcom.com
>Segmentation fault
[...etc...]
>It only seems to happen against netcom.com. I first saw it occurring in my
>mail system, under some rather unusual circumstances, but it's now been
>reported almost everywhere.
>I believe it's related to the 14 DNS 'A' records published for netcom.com.
>Our environment is SunOS 4.1.1 through 4.1.3, NIS and the DNS tunnel. The
>same programs using a pure-DNS resolver library work just fine, so it's some
>sort of NIS interaction.
Nutshell summary:
It's a bug in the SunOS shared C library (libc.s*). The libc jumbo patches
fix it, the relevant patch numbers are:
100266 (4.1.1, 4.1.2)
100890 (4.1.3, 4.1.3C)
101759 (4.1.3_U1)
Sun's description of the bug is: "ftp, ping dump core when connecting to a
host with multiple DNS A records".
Many people reported that they were not seeing the problem. I had sent an
internal mail message out before I sent my message to sun-managers, and
someone here at Tandem knew someone at netcom, and got them to change their
DNS configuration so that they only advertise one A record for netcom.com.
Anyone who tested against netcom.com after that change would not have seen
the problem. If you want to test it on your system, find a nearby host with
a large number of DNS A records and ping it. You can use 'nslookup' or 'dig'
to assist in your search.
Thanks to many people for testing this for me.
--
Scott Hazen Mueller, Tandem Computers +1 408 285 5762 scott@dsg.tandem.com
Unix System/Network Administrator, Host-, Post-, News- and Web-Master
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Fri Sep 28 2001 - 23:09:06 CDT