The 25 Year Old BSD Bug

1983. The year of the IBM PC XT, the Apple Lisa, Pioneer 10 leaving the solar system, and Hooters opening up shop in Florida. It’s also the birthyear of a 25 year old BSD bug, squashed only a few days ago.

A few days ago, Marc Balmer, OpenBSD developer, received an email from an OpenBSD user. The email claimed that SAMBA would crash when serving files off an MS-DOS filesystem. Balmer got into contact with a few SAMBA developers who claimed that SAMBA uses a special workaround in order to function properly on BSD systems: the code for reading directories in all BSDs was flawed.

Note: title references the previous post.

Also, this one is pretty funny (just because it is very strange for a “bug” to live for 25 years. Most “bugs” live much shorter lives (unless they lie in wait to bother you or push out eggs continuously [read link for context]).

It’s that dang starting at zero thing that many people never quite get on computers (yes, I know this is starting at zero in a special case, but it’s still the same concept, as far as jokes go).

25 years of “I think I broked it” and it wasn’t even your fault. And so the machines get smarter.