MS06-049 Causing Silent Data Corruption 205
Uncle Mike writes "It looks like there is a problem with the recently released MS06-049 / KB920958 patch. If you have compression activated on any folder, then the compressed data is at risk from corruption. New files that are close to a multiple of 4K in size will have their last 4,000 bytes or so overwritten with 0xDF. Although this problem has been reported to Microsoft, as yet there appears to have been no official announcement.
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interesting (Score:5, Insightful)
When you have a monopoly (Score:5, Insightful)
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Well I believe I'll invest in a second-party operating system!
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Re:When you have a monopoly (Score:5, Insightful)
>
> What're your customers going to do?
The guy at the keyboard of a Windows Vista box, using Microsoft Office at work, and Windows Media Player at home is not the customer, he is the product. The customers are Dell, AOL, media licensing conglomerates, and so on.
Re:When you have a monopoly (Score:4, Insightful)
Microsoft may be able to leverage all those customers into a product for another customer (such as advertising or licensing DRM solutions), just like the movie theater leverages their movie watching customers into a product for advertising. Until Windows is free (as in beer), the guy using Windows is a still a customer.
Or if you put down the tinfoil hat (Score:3, Insightful)
--
Carnage Blender [carnageblender.com]: Meet interesting people. Kill them.
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After 25 years of dirty tricks from Redmond, you have the gall to call their critics paranoid?
Re:interesting (Score:4, Informative)
That does make a big difference, win2k is not MS' top priority.
Not that I condone their delay or lack of forsight, however.
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And doesn't this just give you warm fuzzies about the reliability of Vista and its 50 million lines of code?
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You know, if I were to create a series of advertisements, I would make it similar to the "Truth" campaign agains
Re:interesting (Score:4, Funny)
Are you this person [amazon.com] by chance?
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You're right, I should've known that venomous EULA would turn right back and bite me (and all Microsoft customers) in the rear.
"Satisfaction Guaranteed!"*
* The term "Satisfaction" and "Guaranteed" are used only for illustration purpouses in a figurative, subliminal manner.
Enlarged to show texture. Serving suggestion.
As a matter of fact, no satisfaction guaranteed whatsoever, by any means.
Reading the words "satisfaction" and "guaranteed" above certifies
They should force them to mention in advertising! (Score:2)
Since the advertising is in great conflict with the EULA.
Just like the "Smoking can cause cancer":
"Using this or other Microsoft products can cause critical data loss, system instability and significant loss of profit for any reason, Microsoft accepts absolutely no responsibility."
three letters (Score:2)
A Paradox... (Score:5, Funny)
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How to avoid (Score:5, Informative)
It has been confirmed that either turning off the compression attribute (disk space permitting) OR uninstalling KB920958 will prevent further loss of data.
Re:How to avoid (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:How to avoid (Score:5, Funny)
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Linux and OSX are Windows patches!
Not necessarily.... (Score:2)
But yeah, yeah... I got the joke.
RAID (Score:3, Funny)
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RAID is not a backup
Welcome to the world of sarcasm (Score:2)
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Heh (Score:3, Funny)
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I can't believe there were > 0 people who replied to Karma Farmer's comment thinking it was anything but an attempt at humour/troll, much less that any such poster would get their manties in a knot over it either.
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Kudos to you, my friend.
Close? (Score:2)
How close is close? Is 162k close to 164k? Sounds like it is to me. From the examples in the discussion cited, it seems that anything over 4k is at risk, not just things 'near' a 4k boundary.
I would even hazzard to guess that the size matters not at all, but rather the contents of the files. If the contents match a certain pattern, the compression goes awry and adds the garbage to the end. (Accidentally overwriting the real data.)
what i think (Score:5, Funny)
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Oh, that explains it: it's a beta patch.
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Oh, that explains it: it's a beta patch.
ß / 0xDF is ß ; or Esset. So the article is incorrect, the last bytes are overwritten with random data in the form of white noise. "ßßßßßßßßßßßß" is pronounced "ssssssssssssssssssssssssss". OMFG!11! SNAKES ON A PLATTER!
Strange (Score:3, Funny)
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More background please... (Score:5, Informative)
After a bit of research, here's what should have been included: MS06-049 [microsoft.com] was an elevation of privledge issue discovered in the kernel of Windows 2000 SP4 only. The patch for the issue, KB920958 [microsoft.com], appears to have a bug resulting in corruption of compressed folder.
The title is misleading as well. MS06-649 is the issue and KB920958 is the patch; the patch is what's causing the corruption, not the original issue.
Why even bother with compression anymore? (Score:2)
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I'm no MS fanboy, but... suppose the OS in question had some sort of directory-compression scheme that had a seven-year track record of impressive stability and effectiveness? Why not use it?
Disk compression earned a terrible rep back in the 90s, when DOS/Windows and Windows 95 themselves were so unstable there was no chance that it could work properly. But MS finally got it right when they swiped tech from Stacker and included directory compression in
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Hundreds of VMWare virtual disks is one place compression comes in handy. Without compression you'd need a multi-terabyte array. With compression, you only need half a terabyte.
Another use is for backup servers, where storing hundreds of GB of data is important but speed is not (and you hate tapes).
Another use is when your server fills up and you don't have a budget for new hardware until the next quarter.
It all adds up to big hardware savings, and indeed is the only reason some of my servers -
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http://www.mikerubel.org/computers/rsync_snapshots
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Those files were important. (Score:3, Funny)
Quick! (Score:2)
Forget it, it's a bug (Score:2)
I personally haven't seen any files corrupted tho
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Not true; updates are released every tuesday.
service packs (notice WinME has had zero service packs)
While Win2k and XP have at least two each. ME was a crumby OS which was meant to have a new OS for people that had to have a new OS every couple of years.
and $50 hotfixes
I've never had to pay for a hotfix, nor has anyone that has gotten th
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Uh, well, WinXP was released in 2001, so its only about a year and a half newer than Win2K. I really don't see a huge difference between running a 6.5 year old OS and running a 5 year old OS.
So? Cars aren't very much like computer oper
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I dunno perhaps because there are a lot of changes in XP; namely that SP2 adds a bunch of stuff and fixes a huge amount of features. At the very least because they actually still sell XP.
So? Cars aren't very much like computer operating systems.
Yes. For some reason computer users expect their computer to be supported
Compressed files, are you kidding me?! (Score:3, Informative)
Is anyone out there seriously using disk compression in a production environment? Didn't anyone teach you guys that disk compression is a crutch and not a solution? For as long as I've been working with servers, all of my mentors have led me to believe that it is pretty much generally accepted practice not to use disk compression due to the potential for data corruption and the performance hit your servers take. If you need to compress files to save space, throw them onto some LTO or DLT media and pull them completely offline.
If you're working for a company that can't come up with more money for disk space, maybe you need to click on the Dice.com adds that are all over /. here.
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They're not performance-critical, so in this case, Windows' compression is incredibly handy.
Similarly, I have a few disc images that I keep around solely so I don't have to put DVDs in th
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I could believe that. But whether or not it's a performance hit, I'm still going to stick to the school of thought that says your asking for trouble if you're compressing your files. That might show that I'm stuck in the neolithic days of the mid-1990s, but so be it. =)
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Sure, you do that. In the meantime, I'll continue using JPEGs, MP3s, ODF,
The LAMER Exterminator !!! (Score:2)
What kind of idiot ... (Score:2)
... makes such massive changes to the VM of a stable kernel that allows this sort of thing to happen in the first place?
Oh wait...
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Re:How does something like this happen (Score:5, Insightful)
The programmer is not to blame here. The real question you should be asking is "What type of QA department fails to catch a bug like this?"
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I agree and disagree with you. As long as the programmer properly unit tested his/her work, then you can shift blame to QA. I have seen developers not properly unit test their code too many times, relying on the QA department to do their work for them. But yes, unless it happens in very rare circumstances (is this the case?) someone should have caught this in testing somewhere... but not necessarily just QA.
IANAQAT (I am not a QA tester).
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Plus, why would you pad with 0xDF instead of null? (There might be a reason, but I don't know of it.)
Re:How does something like this happen (Score:5, Funny)
So this is how Microsoft claims support for ODF. Clever.
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MS bashing is fun and all, but do you have any idea how a kernel works? Anything can step on anything else. An off-by-one error in a kernel can be catastrophic to any number of things. This one does sound suspicious, but keep in mind that the code that is failing is probably only peripherally related to the code that was patched. They say they patched a buffer overflow. Maybe the buffer was already being overflowed by the compression code and patching it caused the compression to break. That migh
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And in this case, being 'extra careful' consists of writing sufficient tests.
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File system is handled by a kernel. File system compresses files before writing them to the disk, respectively decompresses them during read operations. Therefore, the compression is handled in kernel. Where would you handle it?
Data compression is not like black magic. As the matter of fact, the most data compression algorithms out there are mind boggingly simple and very well understood.
Of course you could move the file system into the user space, but that would introduce some bad performance
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Also, you may remember the file corruption bug from an older version of the 2.6 kernel - was it 2.6.10? It was much worse than this one from MS, which
Re:How does something like this happen (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:How does something like this happen (Score:5, Funny)
Every programmer that's ever worked on something longer than 6 or 7 lines of code? Except you, of course. I've been in the bathroom after you and am always impressed by the way it smells just like roses.
You can stop now (Score:2)
If other replies to you have accurately guessed the truth and, as they say, you've never worked on a complicated piece of code, I will save you from spending any more "long time" working on your programming. Here is the program you're trying to make:
Re:You can stop now (Score:5, Funny)
Original troll never writes any bugs, so his hello world is more like this:
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Your program fails to take into account the case that printf(), fprintf(), and write() printed less characters than those that you provided. It further does not handle getting an EINTR on write().
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Possibly some weird M$-esque operator (Score:3, Insightful)
While they are doubtlessly not releasing images with debug info, they might be using an overriden new operator that does something similar (for a variety of reasons).
It is hard to say, but this type of error - while *not* acceptable, *is* understandable,
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I've been coding for 20 years and the IT-QA department catches bugs in my code (after I unit tested them- and another developer cross unit tested them) all the time. That's why they are IT-QA, it's what they do.
Re:How does something like this happen? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:How does something like this happen (Score:4, Insightful)
I love Linux, hate Windows, but point it, sh!t happens.
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It happens. The only interesting thing here is how long they'll take to deal with it.
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You mean the authors of sendmail? Or maybe you were referring to the various Linux kernel root exploits? Oh wait, you meant the authors of PHP.
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Additionally, the thought that MS would release a patch that intentionally corrupts data is unthinkable, for ANY corporation. The civil (and possibly criminal, who knows) liabilities would be ENORMOUS.
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How old are you?
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2000 only. (Score:2)
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You might want to double check.
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A fair point.
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Yep. That one's still in QA.