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Mountain Biking Helps Squash Bugs

Posted by timothy on from the so-do-big-grins dept.

Dr.Milius writes "Henning Brauer of the OpenBSD project recently made an interesting post to the openbsd-tech mailing list about how a mountain bike ride helped him relate two baffling bugs in their new BGP and NTP daemons. It turns out they were both off-by-one errors that were easy to fix but notoriously difficult to spot. Always great when the experts show us how it's done."

3 of 82 comments (clear)

  1. Re:This is news? by ezzzD55J · · Score: 1, Flamebait
    Indeed.. Experts? Show us how it's done? The guy may very well be a guru, but this story isn't evidence of it.. Although it's always easy to comment from the sidelines (and with 20/20 hindsight), the guy says it himself:
    when maintaining counters for list/queue/... entries, don't fuck with either the counter or the list directly anywhere; use wrapper functions that take care for both (not using a counter/list pair is not an option in many, including these two, cases). Not that this is really news, but very well worth recalling...
    No kidding it's not news not to fuck with abstractions, that's the fucking point!
  2. I found the first reply most revealing by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Flamebait

    List: openbsd-tech
    Subject: Re: Anatomy of a bug
    From: br1an
    Date: 2004-09-10 11:28:02
    Message-ID:

    so basically what you're saying is that we have some fuck who can't
    code for shit - proven across two daemons you wrote - commiting code
    both to the userland and kernel of an OS we all rely on for various
    missions?

    great... thanks for keeping us posted.

    -b.

    Extremely well-said.

  3. Re:This is news? by ezzzD55J · · Score: 0, Flamebait

    Flamebait? Overrated? May the metamods roast you moderators for this.