Really strange data corruption. Anyone seen this before ?

[Paul Duffy <paduffy@cisco.com>]

OpenLDAP 2.07 built with gcc 2.95.2 for Solaris 2.6

Simple flat-ish tree structure was loaded with 10,000 objects via ldapadd 
and an LDIF file.  Loaded without problem.  Several test queries operated 
just fine.

Each of these objects contained a "key" attribute that was indexed for fast 
lookup, and a second attribute that carried the object's "payload" - a 3K 
text string.

Now we start up a test client that sequentially fetches the objects and 
parses the text attribute.  6 of the 10000 objects fails the 
parse.  Further investigation reveals that these 6 parse failures were due 
to a single garbage character placed in the text string.  This was verified 
both via the test client and ldapsearch tool.  These garbage characters 
were not in the LDIF file (the same LDIF file was used with Netscape DS 
without this problem).

So it appears that, somehow, these few characters on a few objects were 
mangled within the OpenLDAP server.

It gets stranger...

Deleting all 10,000 objects and reloading makes the problem go away.

Weird, very weird.

Thoughts ?


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Paul B Duffy                paduffy@cisco.com
Cisco Systems, Inc.
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