Getting hobbit running on FreeBSD 🔗 link

Hello all,

I've just had a try at installing hobbit on various versions (5.3, 5.4)
of FreeBSD. I was getting segvs whenever hobbitd started. After a little
work with gdb I found that allocating some buffers was based on
hostcount when hostcount was zero. I presume that on some other
platforms a zero sized malloc returns some useful amount of memory but
not on FreeBSD (it claims to return some storage rather than NULL
depending on /etc/malloc.conf but apparently not enough).

I patched hobbitd.c to increase the size (without bothering to look at
the code in any detail) and now it doesn't segv on me.

I hope this helps someone else trying to make it run.

BTW: I also had to change the group of most of the installation to my
web server group after installation. I possibly could have created the
hobbit user in the web group to get arround this but somehow it seems
tacky.

Thanks for the nice software,

Brian


--- hobbit-4.1.1.orig/hobbitd/hobbitd.c Tue Jul 26 00:55:43 2005
+++ hobbit-4.1.1/hobbitd/hobbitd.c      Thu Sep  1 13:18:04 2005
@@ -2122,7 +2122,7 @@
 
                if (lastboardsize == 0) {
                        /* A guesstimate - 8 tests per hosts, 1KB/test
(only 1st line of msg) */
-                       bufsz = hostcount*8*1024; 
+                       bufsz = (hostcount+1)*8*1024; 
                }
                else {
                        /* Add 10% to the last size we used */
@@ -2274,7 +2274,7 @@
 
                if (lastboardsize == 0) {
                        /* A guesstimate - 8 tests per hosts, 2KB/test
(only 1st line of msg) */
-                       bufsz = hostcount*8*2048; 
+                       bufsz = (hostcount+1)*8*2048; 
                }
                else {
                        /* Add 10% to the last size we used */


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Hi Brian,

On Thu, Sep 01, 2005 at 03:05:04PM +1000, Scott, Brian wrote:

Thanks! Doing a "malloc(0)" is apparently undefined behaviour, so it
should be avoided, and your solution is a reasonable way of doing that.

Someone else reported problems with Hobbit on OpenBSD - it could be that
this is the same problem.

That should not be needed - the only directories that need to be
writable by the web server group are the "www/rep" and "www/snap"
directories used when generating reports. What problems did you have 
that necessitated this ?


Regards,
Henrik

That should not be needed - the only directories that need to be
writable by the web server group are the "www/rep" and "www/snap"
directories used when generating reports. What problems did you have 
that necessitated this ?

Ability to read. My umask by default doesn't give anything to 'others'
by default so the web server can't read the files. A way of doing this
(without making everything universally readable) is to have it set up
as:

drwxr-x---  8 hobbit  www     512 Sep  1 14:00 server

This way hobbit can change things and the web server can read them.

I guess I'm just a bit paranoid about security and like my restrictive
umask.

Thanks again.

Brian

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This message is intended for the addressee named and may contain
privileged information or confidential information or both. If you
are not the intended recipient please delete it and notify the sender.
**********************************************************************

We are using hobbit for a while on FreeBSD (from the beta to the latest
4.1.1), we never encountered this problem. We are running two hobbits
servers on 5.4 stable. Do you get a core as soon as you start it ? 

What version of hobbit have you tried to install ? On the client side, we
needed to modify the hobbit client (already reported on this list) to be
able to check memory bigger than 2 gb and to avoid to report disk problem
with devfs at 100%

Laurent

-----Original Message-----
From: Scott, Brian [mailto:user-df7f2d901ba1@xymon.invalid] 
Sent: Thursday, September 01, 2005 7:05 AM
To: user-ae9b8668bcde@xymon.invalid
Subject: [hobbit] Getting hobbit running on FreeBSD

Hello all,

I've just had a try at installing hobbit on various versions (5.3, 5.4)
of FreeBSD. I was getting segvs whenever hobbitd started. After a little
work with gdb I found that allocating some buffers was based on
hostcount when hostcount was zero. I presume that on some other
platforms a zero sized malloc returns some useful amount of memory but
not on FreeBSD (it claims to return some storage rather than NULL
depending on /etc/malloc.conf but apparently not enough).

I patched hobbitd.c to increase the size (without bothering to look at
the code in any detail) and now it doesn't segv on me.

I hope this helps someone else trying to make it run.

BTW: I also had to change the group of most of the installation to my
web server group after installation. I possibly could have created the
hobbit user in the web group to get arround this but somehow it seems
tacky.

Thanks for the nice software,

Brian


--- hobbit-4.1.1.orig/hobbitd/hobbitd.c Tue Jul 26 00:55:43 2005
+++ hobbit-4.1.1/hobbitd/hobbitd.c      Thu Sep  1 13:18:04 2005
@@ -2122,7 +2122,7 @@
 
                if (lastboardsize == 0) {
                        /* A guesstimate - 8 tests per hosts, 1KB/test
(only 1st line of msg) */
-                       bufsz = hostcount*8*1024; 
+                       bufsz = (hostcount+1)*8*1024; 
                }
                else {
                        /* Add 10% to the last size we used */
@@ -2274,7 +2274,7 @@
 
                if (lastboardsize == 0) {
                        /* A guesstimate - 8 tests per hosts, 2KB/test
(only 1st line of msg) */
-                       bufsz = hostcount*8*2048; 
+                       bufsz = (hostcount+1)*8*2048; 
                }
                else {
                        /* Add 10% to the last size we used */


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This message is intended for the addressee named and may contain
privileged information or confidential information or both. If you
are not the intended recipient please delete it and notify the sender.
**********************************************************************

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