Gordon Messmer <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>Matthew Saltzman wrote:
>> Wierd. All of a sudden, linuxconf has started terminating with a
>> segfault as soon as I start it up.
>
>I usually do something like:
>strace linuxconf 2>&1 | grep open
>or:
>ltrace linuxconf 2>&1
>when programs crash. Try the first one, it might help you out.
>
>What you'll see is that the last thing a program does before it
>segfaults is usually the cause of the segfault. So, the last open()
>that linuxconf does before it crashes should tell you what file it's
>examining. There's almost certainly something wrong with that file.
>
>Let me know whether or not it helps :)
The ltrace convinced me that the problem was with the /etc/dhcpd.conf
file, although that was not the last file accessed. VMware manages a
special DHCP on its own virtual subnet for the virtual machine. They
recommend that those already managing DHCP include an entry for the
new subnet with no "range" parameter. Linuxconf, however, insists
that the range cannot be empty. I had edited the dhcpd.conf file by
hand, and when linuxconf tried to use the missing parameter (but *not*
when it loaded it), it performed a strdup() to an uninitialized
pointer.
Commenting out my changes and reinstalling them with linuxconf
solved the problem, although the range of the new subnet is not
empty. I'll be reporting this to VMware. It would be nice if
linuxconf were a bit more robust to bad config files, however.
Thanks for the tip! I'm going to have to try this with the GNOME
CD player, which crashes my entire system big-time with my Ricoh
CD-R/W, but that's another post for another day...
Matthew Saltzman
Clemson University Math Sciences
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://www.math.clemson.edu/~mjs
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