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Re: Linux inetd..


From: avalon () COOMBS ANU EDU AU (Darren Reed)
Date: Wed, 3 Dec 1997 16:39:03 +1100


In some mail from Alan Cox, sie said:

Now you may be wondering why does a write to the socket returned by
accept() generates a SIGPIPE. This bring us to the second issue. It seems
that at least under Linux 2.0.X accept will return a socket in the
received queue if it is not in the SYN_SENT or SYN_RECV state, even when
it has not gone through the ESTABLISHED state.

By doing a stealth scan on the port the socket goes from the SYN_RECV
state to the CLOSED state. When you try to read from such a socket you
get a SIGPIPE. The sematics of Linux's accept seems to be non-standard. I
wonder what else breaks by not handling SIGPIPE.

On that issue you are a little astray. Linux merely made the window for
the inetd problem a bit larger. You can hit a box betwen the accept
returning towards user space and the write() with a seperate RST frame
regardless of what accept returns. If generic BSD has this missing
SIGPIPE I venture to say that if you can hit the precise boundary needed
you can bring down inetd there too.

I don't see that being a problem for the BSD inetd as it fork()s before the
write and the process which receives the SIGPIPE is a child of inetd, not
the master (so to speak).  I would have thought the linux one would behave
the same.

Darren



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