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Do you have any daemons that run as root and do networking? Are you sure that all of them check the length of the host name before passing it to gethostbyname?
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On Linux: ping [huge host name] works ftp [huge host name] works finger [huge host name] works nslookup [huge host name] ... CRUNCH (Segmentation fault)
Ouch.....! On Linux: rsh [huge host name] crashes bad... (file system now corrupted) The above claims for ping, ftp and finger may be dependent on how huge is huge. rsh took a very large number (I'm guessing 10 lines, 800 characters) before crashing. Huge was not this huge for the previous tests. rsh is usually suid root. I must quit experimenting now.... and repair my system. Crypto relevance: little.... some hack relevance, lots of general system/network security relevance Cort.