Horton

Thread

  1. General Bug Report: Server hangs, with backends still running on accept() failure

    Unprivileged user <nobody> — 1999-05-27T18:30:20Z

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                        POSTGRESQL BUG REPORT TEMPLATE
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Your name               : Shez
Your email address      : shez@nsl.net

Category                : runtime: back-end
Severity                : critical

Summary: Server hangs,with backends still running on accept() failure

System Configuration
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  Operating System   : RH Linux 5.2(x86 on K6II)

  PostgreSQL version : 6.4.2

  Compiler used      : gcc-2.7.2.3-14

Hardware:
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RH Linux 5.2(x86 on K6II)
Linux media.nsl.net 2.0.36 #1 Tue Oct 13 22:17:11 EDT 1998 i586 unknown


Versions of other tools:
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Problem Description:
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A lightly loaded server with about 16 backends running at 
anytime hung dead.  Attempts to connect simply hung and 
existing backend processes also hung.  Last entry in the logs were:
ERROR:  postmaster: StreamConnection: accept: Invalid argument      
This seems to have come in the mail list, 
but I could see no resolution on the list.
As far as I can see it happens if the accept call fails on 
an inet connection.
I have a small test program (below) which causes a similar but
not identical crash.

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Test Case:
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This connects to a given machine port combination and then 
attempts to kill its self before the operation can be
completed, resulting in the accept call on the server
returning:
StreamConnection: accept: Connection reset by peer

I have put it up on http://sheznet.nsl.net/crash.c rather
than try and paste it into this form.
usage: ./crash dbhost 5432
The crash program only works for me when ran from a different
machine than the server.


Note that this is a serious security issue, with anybody who
can send packets to a listening server being able to hang it.


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Solution:
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I believe that when accept() fails the backend should at
least quit the server properly so that supervise programs 
can restart it, or just silently ignore the failure - this
has worked for me in similar situations.

Sorry I don't have time to investigate further, but please
feel free to contact me if you have further questions.

Sincerely.
Shez

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