Subj : sbbsecho and bad packets
To   : Digital Man
From : deon
Date : Tue Oct 21 2025 10:52:34

  Re: sbbsecho and bad packets
  By: Digital Man to deon on Mon Oct 20 2025 03:48 pm

Hey DM,

 > FWIW, Tom Jenning's Fido software (specifically, unpmsg() from unpacket.c)
 > would've barfed on any message without a NUL-terminated date/time as well.
 > https://www.sensitiveresearch.com/Archive/FidoNet/index.html
 >
 > It would would even trigger a buffer overflow (off-by-one) bug in his code!
 > Just something I came across that was probably related to this discussion.

Thanks, and interesting.

I still contend that the "standard" doesnt reflect this, which doesnt make sense (at least 2 me) on many levels. <shrug>

(And yes, I think there are probably many other things that are not following any "standards" anymore..)

Not sure what (Randy?) was thinking/intending in 1995. It certainly makes sense that it might be probably easier to code as a null terminated string and at the end of the day the most common representation of a date "yyyy-mm-dd hh:mm:ss" or "dd MMM yy  hh:mm:ss" are both 19 chars, so being fixed at 19 chars (to save that byte) may have worked as well. Actually, saving the extra space before the time in the later format would have saved another byte, (or converting it to an unsigned int probably would have saved more). I guess by 1995, 2 bytes in a packet at those modem speeds wasnt a big deal, especially since it was negligble once compressed into a zip/arj file.

Anyway, I think my code handles both in case it pops up in other ways...


....лоеп

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