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To: marc@physik.uni-wuerzburg.de (Marc Binderberger)
cc: questions@freebsd.org
Subject: Re: FreeBSD != 4.4BSD ??? 
In-reply-to: Your message of "Wed, 06 Sep 95 20:02:42 +0200."
             <199509061802.UAA10110@wptx02.physik.uni-wuerzburg.de> 
From: David Greenman <davidg@Root.COM>
Reply-To: davidg@Root.COM
Date: Wed, 06 Sep 1995 13:16:50 -0700
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>up to now I understood FreeBSD 2.x as an implementation of 4.4BSD (light)
>on PC based hardware. Hmm... I'm irritated by the following article
>Eric Allman wrote about the possibility to overload the internal
>syslog buffer:
>
>[Newsgroups: comp.mail.sendmail, Message-ID: <427sc8$4q6@agate.berkeley.edu>]
>	[...]
>  THE REAL PROBLEM IS NOT IN SENDMAIL AND IS ARGUABLY NOT IN SYSLOG.
>  The real problem is in sprintf and vsprintf.  We learned way back
>  with the Internet Worm that routines that write a buffer without
>  taking a buffer size (in that case, gets) are a bad idea, but except
>  for 4.4BSD, no one seems to have figured out that sprintf (and
>  vsprintf) are included in this list.
>	[...]
>
>So I expected to have no such problems. But a look into the sources
>(I'm using FreeBSD 2.1.0-950726-SNAP) and a small test program (just
>logging 16k of `x' ... core!) tells me that I must have something
>misunderstood. Seems that FreeBSD isn't produced totally out of the
>4.4BSD Sources? Or do I over-interpret Eric's article?

   Well, as one of the two people who did the initial port of 4.4-Lite that
became FreeBSD 2.x, I can say most certainly that FreeBSD _is_ based on
4.4BSD-Lite as released from Berkeley.
   I don't know what Eric was talking about, but I'm sure there is a simple
misunderstanding.

-DG