On Fri Feb 29, I wrote:
Hi,
After many years of flawless procmail performance as our local mail
delivery agent, we are now seeing frequent corruption in our users'
mailboxes. The corruption seems to always be of the form:
\000 ... \000From user(_at_)dom(_dot_)ain date
where \000 is a the null byte. That is, we are seeing a series of nulls
(30 to 3000+) prepended to the message (or perhaps appended from the
previous message).
After a month of pain, we finally found the solution to this problem.
It wasn't procmail's fault (as everyone probably knew), but since it
seems procmail is especially vulnerable to it, I thought I'd post
the results here. It turned out to be a kernel bug:
http://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux-2.6.git;a=commitdiff;h=5d47a35600270e7115061cb1320ee60ae9bcb6b8
I believe this bug is present in all kernels after 2.6.17. Anyone who
uses O_APPEND (as procmail does) on such a kernel over NFS is vulnerable.
I am surprised this isn't more widely known. As soon as I applied that
patch, our corruption disappeared.
Thanks to all who responded.
Fletcher
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