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Date: Sat, 13 Sep 1997 15:59:39 +0200 (CEST)
From: Blaz Zupan <blaz@amis.net>
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Subject: bin/4524: Possible buggy malloc in -stable
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>Number:         4524
>Category:       bin
>Synopsis:       procmail can swap machine to death with malloc.c from -stable
>Confidential:   no
>Severity:       serious
>Priority:       medium
>Responsible:    freebsd-bugs
>State:          open
>Class:          sw-bug
>Submitter-Id:   current-users
>Arrival-Date:   Sat Sep 13 07:00:01 PDT 1997
>Last-Modified:
>Originator:     Blaz Zupan
>Organization:
Medinet
>Release:        FreeBSD 2.2-STABLE i386
>Environment:

	procmail 3.11p4 as installed from the ports collection,
	latest 2.2-STABLE

>Description:

	When trying to deliver a big mail with procmail as the local
	delivery agent, procmail can eat all your swap and the machine
	simply swaps to death (I was able to reproduce this on my machine
	by sending the netscape binary to myself :).

	Martijn Koster <mak@webcrawler.com> has mentioned on the -stable
	mailing list that replacing the malloc.c in libc with the one
	from -current helps and I tried it and now the machine still swaps
	like hell but it doesn't halt like it did before, instead procmail
	is killed with a simple "Out of memory".

	I'm not sure whether the underlying problem is procmail or the
	new malloc introduced with 2.2, but I know that procmail was
	working just fine with 2.1.x and as soon as I upgraded to 2.2.x
	it started acting up, so I suspect malloc is at fault.

>How-To-Repeat:

	Install procmail as local delivery agent for sendmail and send
	some big mail to yourself (the netscape binary MIME encoded will do
	just fine).

>Fix:
	
	One fix that IMHO should be done is upgrading malloc.c to the
	one from -current (a close inspection of the changes reveals a
	typo in the -stable malloc.c which should be fixed anyway).
	Possibly also procmail is buggy as replacing procmail with
	mail.local works just fine.


>Audit-Trail:
>Unformatted: