serious uucp bug

utzoo!decvax!ucbvax!mhtsa!ihnss!cbosg!cbosgd!mark utzoo!decvax!ucbvax!mhtsa!ihnss!cbosg!cbosgd!mark
Fri Oct 23 12:48:01 AEST 1981


I have tracked down a bug in uucp which causes one site to get stuff
that was supposed to go to another.  This only happens if you talk to
two different sites, one of whose names is a prefix of the other.
(Thus, cbosg and cbosgd, or duke and duke34.)  If your (third) site
spools something to, say, cbosgd, and the call doesn't go through,
then later, if you happen to be talking to cbosg and the job is still
spooled, cbosg will ask you "got anything for me?" and your system will
say "Aha!  I see something that starts with cbosg - that must be for you@
and send it.  I would appreciate it if anyone who talks to both cbosg
and cbosg[bcd] would fix this.  (This includes research, mhtsa, chico,
harpo, ucbvax.)  Likewise, if your L.sys contains two names such that
one is a prefix of the other, you probably want to fix it.

The bug is in anlwrk.c, in routine bldflst.  (If you have an old uucp,
e.g. anything outside Bell Labs, the routine is gtwrk.)  A few lines into
the code you see
	if (!prefix(pre, filename))
which should be changed to
	if (!prefix(pre, filename) || strlen(filename)-strlen(pre) != 5)

This bug seems to be fixed in UNIX 4.0 (anlwrk 4.0 11/11/80) but not in
earlier versions.



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