Bug 38369

Summary:	rpm complains
Product:	[Retired] Red Hat Linux	Reporter:	Ari Inki <ari.inki>
Component:	rpm	Assignee:	Jeff Johnson <jbj>
Status:	CLOSED NOTABUG	QA Contact:	David Lawrence <dkl>
Severity:	medium	Docs Contact:
Priority:	medium
Version:	7.1	CC:	ari.inki, dr
Target Milestone:	---	Keywords:	Security
Target Release:	---
Hardware:	i386
OS:	Linux
Whiteboard:
Fixed In Version:		Doc Type:	Bug Fix
Doc Text:		Story Points:	---
Clone Of:		Environment:
Last Closed:	2001-04-30 08:24:36 UTC	Type:	---
Regression:	---	Mount Type:	---
Documentation:	---	CRM:
Verified Versions:		Category:	---
oVirt Team:	---	RHEL 7.3 requirements from Atomic Host:
Cloudforms Team:	---	Target Upstream Version:
Embargoed:

Description Ari Inki 2001-04-30 06:57:37 UTC

From Bugzilla Helper:
User-Agent: Mozilla/4.77 [en] (X11; U; Linux 2.4.2-2 i686)


After (e.g.) 'rpm -qa' command, on the last line, rpm complains
"memory alloc (28 bytes) returned NULL." This seems to also affect
up2date operations, up2date also crashes and reports the same "memory alloc
(28 bytes) returned NULL.". 

It might be that the RPM database is somehow corrupted, at some point I
remember having two instances of one package when doing 'rpm -qa', I
managed to remove all of the instances, but it might be that the database
is still broken. I tried doing 'rpm --rebuilddb', no use, problem persists.

Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:
1. rpm -qa
2. or, try to use up2date

	

Actual Results:  "memory alloc (28 bytes) returned NULL."


Expected Results:  no error messages

Comment 1 Daniel Roesen 2001-04-30 08:22:05 UTC

Where is the security problem?

Comment 2 Ari Inki 2001-04-30 08:24:31 UTC

DoS. Security updates available through up2date cannot be applied since
up2date does not work. Denial of Service.

Comment 3 Jeff Johnson 2001-05-06 13:47:54 UTC

The error message indicates that malloc is failing. This is usually not
an rpm problem. rpm prints an error message and exits rather than segfaulting
when malloc returns a NULL pointer.

You might look carefully at your kernel, as there have been known file system
corruption problems in early 2.4 kernels that show up as rpm database corruption
problems.

Marking as NOTABUG because I don't see a problem with rpm exiting because
malloc returns a NULL pointer rather than segfaulting, and the real problem
is that malloc is returning a NULL pointer for reasons unknown.