Mountain Biking Helps Squash Bugs

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."

Comments

This is news?

[agent dero]

This is something well known to work. It's not the bike riding, it's the act of "taking a break from the problem." Think back to the origins of "Eureka!"

I, for example, will often go grab a Coke, talk to people, etc, and somewhere along the line, by _not_ focussing so hard on the problem, I come up with the answer.

Re:not difficult to spot at all

[Homology]

The OpenBSD developers does not fool themselves into thinking that they don't make mistakes. Several of the techniques they use, like privilege revocation and privilege separation is to lessen the impact of programming mistakes, including their own. Theo de Raadt recently gave a talk on Exploit Mitigation Techniques

As for not using C, I've read that Theo de Raadt likes the compiler and language that is used in Plan 9. Can't use it due to license problems, though.

Re:not difficult to spot at all

[Homology]

Most likely the C-dialect compiler that Plan 9 uses. But the AT&T license is too restrictive for Plan 9 code to be imported into BSD, as far as I know.