Autotools related problems in freeradius 1.1.6

[Kostas Zorbadelos]

On Tue, Apr 24, 2007 at 01:12:26PM +0200, Alan DeKok wrote:
> Kostas Zorbadelos wrote:
> > I disagree with you on this one Alan. I discovered all these issues I
> > mention the hard way, after our radius server stopped running in
> > random times (after a failure in rad_assert() in request_list.c around
> > the section 
> ...
> > In production environments the server should be able to at least
> > report the errors it encounters and continue operations. Service
> > availability is the most important.
> 
>   My point was that it should continue doing *what*?  The assertions are
> there to catch catastrophic failures in the code.  If the assertion
> trips, it's doing so because the error is non-recoverable.
> 
>   If you disable the assertions, the server may look like it's still
> running.  But there's no guarantee that it will do anything useful.  It
> may crash randomly later, for reasons that are difficult to track down.
>  The only *safe* thing to do is to revert to a known working state.
> i.e. restart from scratch.
>

In the code snippet I sent, from what I can tell, nothing catastrophic
happens. The code checks to see if it is time to send a delayed reject
back to the client and asserts that there is no child thread that
works on that request. Anyway, if the developer flags are switched off
rad_assert() does nothing. This is the way it is defined:

#ifdef NDEBUG
        #define rad_assert(expr) ((void) (0))
#else
        #define rad_assert(expr) \
                ((void) ((expr) ? 0 : \
                        rad_assert_fail (__FILE__, __LINE__)))
#endif

So if someone compiles freeradius without developer flags he actually
de-activates all assertions :)

 
> > As far as I can tell, the following minor patch should take care of the
> > issue of having developer flags switched off be default:
> 
>   OK, thanks.
> 

There is the Solaris issue however. I will try to track it down and
send a patch for this too if I can.


Kostas Zorbadelos

>   Alan DeKok.
> --
>   http://deployingradius.com       - The web site of the book
>   http://deployingradius.com/blog/ - The blog
> -