Autzoo.1150 net.v7bugs utzoo!henry Tue Nov 24 12:49:20 1981 uucp seqno wraparound The code in uux (and elsewhere?) that picks filenames for spool files makes no attempt to cope with wraparound of the 4-digit sequence number. A busy site like decvax can wrap the sequence number in less than a week. This is bad news if you are a site that polls a busy site infrequently. The odds are excellent that you will lose X-files (containing uux commands to be executed at your site) since their spool files have names which are protected against collisions only by the sequence number. The C-files (which actually control transmission) and D-files (which contain the data the X-files operate on) are less vulnerable because their spool names contain the name of your site as well, but it is still possible for them to get stomped (the chances increase as the quantity of traffic spooled for you increases). The symptoms of X-file loss are files with names like D.mysiteB2345 piling up in /usr/spool/uucp. (If you use uuclean or the equivalent to clean out the directory, you may have to look sharp to notice them before they vanish!) The symptoms of C-file or D-file stomping are missing traffic and mismatches between data and commands (e.g. something that looks like mail being fed to news instead). Clearly uux (et al?) should iterate until it finds an unused filename. Due to race conditions etc., this may not be as easy as it sounds. I have not investigated in detail; at the moment the problem can be controlled by frequent polling. This obviously won't work forever if the network traffic keeps increasing. ----------------------------------------------------------------- gopher://quux.org/ conversion by John Goerzen of http://communication.ucsd.edu/A-News/ This Usenet Oldnews Archive article may be copied and distributed freely, provided: 1. There is no money collected for the text(s) of the articles. 2. The following notice remains appended to each copy: The Usenet Oldnews Archive: Compilation Copyright (C) 1981, 1996 Bruce Jones, Henry Spencer, David Wiseman.