🚀 go-pugleaf

A long-dormant AMS bug hit us over the weekend, crippling our entire AMS
bboard system until I came in this morning and sorted it out.  I'm
sending this bug to a number of people & lists because the bug was
tickled by a mal-formed message that appeared on the "xpert" mailing
list, which is received by a number of other sites.  Therefore it is
possible that other people are equally wedged, and I wanted to warn AMS
bboard system maintainers about the problem as quickly as possible.

The bug is caused by a badly-malformed "Date" header.  The message in
question had the following:

Date: Fri, 17 May 91 13:56:47 (Ti

Apparently that date causes the date parsing routines to go into an
infinite loop!  You can test this by running cui and typing

whenis Fri, 17 May 91 13:56:47 (Ti

On both sun3 and sun4 platforms, this seems to cause an infinite loop.

I will try to follow up with a patch before too long, but I wanted to
get this warning out quickly.  If your bboard system is similarly stuck,
you can probably fix the bug by killing & restarting your cui daemon
after either eliminating the offending message or adding a trailing
right paren to its date header.

Amazing, really, that it would appear that no such header was previously
encountered by any of the AMS-based bboard systems.  Of course, the
header is totally out of spec, but cui should be able to tolerate it
better than that...