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PID: Synchronet 3.21a-Linux master/b7d3db6c3 Sep 28 2025 GCC 10.2.1
TID: SBBSecho 3.30-Linux master/88b423313 Sep 29 2025 GCC 12.2.0
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  Re: sbbsecho and bad packets
  By: Digital Man to deon on Mon Oct 20 2025 03:48 pm

Hey DM,

 > FWIW, Tom Jenning's Fido software (specifically, unpmsg() from unpacket.c)
 > would've barfed on any message without a NUL-terminated date/time as well.
 > https://www.sensitiveresearch.com/Archive/FidoNet/index.html
 >
 > It would would even trigger a buffer overflow (off-by-one) bug in his code!
 > Just something I came across that was probably related to this discussion.

Thanks, and interesting.

I still contend that the "standard" doesnt reflect this, which doesnt make
sense (at least 2 me) on many levels. 

(And yes, I think there are probably many other things that are not following
any "standards" anymore..)

Not sure what (Randy?) was thinking/intending in 1995. It certainly makes
sense that it might be probably easier to code as a null terminated string and
at the end of the day the most common representation of a date "yyyy-mm-dd
hh:mm:ss" or "dd MMM yy  hh:mm:ss" are both 19 chars, so being fixed at 19
chars (to save that byte) may have worked as well. Actually, saving the extra
space before the time in the later format would have saved another byte, (or
converting it to an unsigned int probably would have saved more). I guess by
1995, 2 bytes in a packet at those modem speeds wasnt a big deal, especially
since it was negligble once compressed into a zip/arj file.

Anyway, I think my code handles both in case it pops up in other ways...


...ëîåï

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