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Billennium's Over - Anything Break?
An Anonymous Coward writes: "The billennium party at OpenProjects.Net rocked! Check out the log for the whole event over here. Please don't forget to use one of the mirrors. Thanks :-)" Well, anyone have anything break due to the rollover?
You could just prepend a 0 to the front of the old filenames, and it'll sort them all correctly.
See what happens when you don't use leading zeros? *grin*
Apparently there is a bug in older version of KMail from KDE 1.x that prevents KMail from correctly displaying the current date since billenium. More information about KMail billenium bug is on www.kde.org.
This was sent out to the freebsd mailing lists by John Polstra:
This morning a bug was discovered in most versions of CVSup up to and including SNAP_16_1c. The bug causes all newly-updated files to receive incorrect timestamps. Usually the files receive timestamps from early in 1970. This bug has been present for a very long time,
but it only began to have an effect when the Unix representation of the date and time passed 1,000,000,000. That occurred on 9 September
2001 at 01:46:40 UTC. Yes, other people had Y2K bugs, but I managed to produce an S1G bug.
There was more, but that was the jist.
It very much does, which brings up the point that the reason many MySQL databases suck is not due to the engine itself, but rather due to the newbies who create them.
--
Evan
"$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien
knode (0.4)
The kde news reader now orders incoming messages false. All new messages after the billenium are ordered older than the ones from before.
--
Karma 50, and all I got was this lousy T-Shirt.
OpenLDAP has massive breakage both in the 1.2 and 2.x series with the S2G Unix time rollover.
The slurpd server completely fails to push updates from the master server to the slaves, due to string compares of timestamps in 1.2 and a related problem in 2.x. There are patches for both in OpenLDAP CVS.
The problem is detailed in the openldap-bugs mailing list -- it was extremely scary to come to work this morning and find out that all the LDAP servers had stopped pushing updates, causing account creations to fail and mail to bounce!
Nope, there are some more dates with problems prior to 2038, see this list for some of the more important ones. (I saw a more extensive list once during the pre-Y2K buildup, but those web sites have mostly disappeared. Anyone?)
I would like to make your attention on bug which was introduced tonight and can affect some people who are using (var)char field to store timestamp data.
It is not worst security bug. It affects only people who already had bug in their code. Just now this bug become visible/exploitable.
This is not MySQL bug. This is how people use their database. Also similar situation can be found in other software. I would like to inform people in public list as maybe some people have to search similar problems.
The problem: Computers store time and date usually as integer value representing amount of seconds from 1 January 1970. Tonight it overrolled from 999999999 to 1000000000.
Possible bug and exploit relies on fact that some people have used character type of field to store this seconds information (we have already such case)
example:
mysql> create table session (expire varchar(100) not null);
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.31 sec)
mysql> insert into session values (999999997), (999999998), (999999999),
(1000000000), (1000000001);
Query OK, 5 rows affected (0.00 sec)
Records: 5 Duplicates: 0 Warnings: 0
mysql>
mysql> select * from session;
+------------+
| expire |
+------------+
| 999999997 |
| 999999998 |
| 999999999 |
| 1000000000 |
| 1000000001 |
+------------+
5 rows in set (0.00 sec)
mysql>
Let's assume that this table contains values we use somewhere to authenticate users. After user logs in, we write down session expiry time and later we check it like this:
mysql> select count(*) from session where expire >= '1000032535';
+----------+
| count(*) |
+----------+
| 3 |
+----------+
1 row in set (0.00 sec)
mysql>
WOW, what happened? Shouldn't be 100003253 bigger than any value in table? It worked yesterday!
In MySQL we suggested people to use quotation marks around integer values. This can avoid many web-based attacks targeted to modify SQL commands (more information on http://www.mysql.com/doc/G/e/General_security.html ). This is the reason why people put quotation marks around integer expressions and this is correct. Also automatic type casting will fix the source problem is column data is integer or some time/date vale. But when both column is character type and expression, they get compared as strings. And as we know, strings get sorted in order:
1,11,2,22
but integers:
1.2.11.22
So, this is why 100003253
It is possible that some web applicatons have endless expiry times now and not only in MySQL contexts.
Umm, no. That'd be a 31-bit number, as is the case with time_t which is a SIGNED integer. A 32-bit value can hold 2^32-1 = 4,294,967,295.
Can anyone tell me why this is a Real Problem? The obvious solution is to simply change the compilers from:
typedef long time_t;
to:
typedef unsigned long time_t;
And we can merrily keep using time_t on our 32-bit systems until 2106.
Yeah, fubar systems will break. And yeah, we'll have to change some kernel API parameter types. Cry me a river!
Actually, I think most of the posts I've read so far indicate not a problem in storage allocation, but instead a problem in sorting -- IE, they used a string sort rather than numeric.
your Python will succeed or fail in an equal number of situations as Perl
Sorry, I disagree. I'm neither a Python nor Perl biggot (don't have much time to devote to either), but the point made in the parent post was that in a strongly typed language like Python, programmers are prevented from using the wrong form of comparison. Yes, Perl has different comparison methods for numeric and string and yes, the programmer has nobody to blame but themselves if they make such a mistake, but having the language do a bit of idiot-proofing will ultimately yield fewer bugs. So no, I don't think there will be an equal number of failures in Python.
Note that I don't think this makes Python "better" or Perl "worse." It's just a feature that needs to be considered when choosing a language for a project.
GreyPoopon
--
Why is it I can write insightful comments but can't come up with a clever signature?
We use an older version of UW IMAP ad UW Pine both patched to use Maildir support (because they are too short-sighted to integrate such support themselves).
After the roll-over both programs started mis-sorting newly arrived messages to the top of the folder, rather than the bottom (but newly arrived messages are still sorted below older, within each category of 'before' and 'after' the 1 billion second point). Also getting 'mailbox changed unexpectedly, reloading' messages constantly.