Re: Wierld crashes been plaguing me

From: George (greerga@DRAGON.HAM.MUOHIO.EDU)
Date: 09/16/97


On Tue, 16 Sep 1997, Chris Jacobson wrote:

>Please, if you have ever had crashes in "act" being called from "damage"
>on rare occurence, when dealing with a death blow, read this, or if you
>are experienced in matters of odd odd ODD bugs/crashes...
[snip]
>This shouldn't be happening.  However, on ALL the crashes, the in_room
>has ALWAYS been the same: '16394'.  This isn't some random data... its
>downright confusing!  I used to have these crashes previously, but I had
>thought I had fixed it by making "acid_burn" non-event based (just a
>single burn instead of repetetive burns), where a weak mobile that might
>be killed by the event continued to do things.
[snip]
>And worst of all, this is not a regularly reproduceable crash... I don't
>know whats going on.
[snip]

You have perfectly described a classic memory overrun/overflow.

Every single time I ran my little corrupt function to test the buffer code,
it corrupted the exact same memory in the same way everytime.  No crashes,
but extremely unstable memory state.

There are a few memory-related bugs in stock code I have found but most of
them were (fairly) benign.

--
George Greer  -  Me@Null.net   | Genius may have its limitations, but stupidity
http://www.van.ml.org/~greerga | is not thus handicapped. -- Elbert Hubbard


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