Re: Anonymous Qmail Denial of Service

From: Nick Andrew (nickat_private)
Date: Mon Jan 04 1999 - 14:48:55 PST

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    In message <3.0.1.32.19990104013631.0092a770at_private>, Trev writes:
    >Pardon my comments here, I am no qmail expert (I don't even run the thing),
    >but surely you could get around this by applying a small patch to
    >qmail-queue to look for such zero-length files and remove any that are
    >found (ie: one of the first things it does).
    
    Naively it sounds like a good idea. In practice though, there is a race
    condition between one instance of qmail-queue creating a file (at which
    point it has zero length) and another instance finding and removing the
    same, in-use file. Additional tests would have to be performed such as
    testing time-since-creation.
    
    Holistically however, this kind of "cleanup" offends my sense of the tao
    of system programming. Processes should not leave crud to be cleaned up by
    later, unrelated processes.
    
    Nick.
    



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