Very strange problem with 2.2.2 (and 2.3-rc1) on FreeBSD-5.x

[Jeff Aitken]

On Thu, Feb 19, 2004 at 09:43:36AM -0500, Jeff Aitken wrote:
> I recently installed rancid-2.2.2 on a freshly-installed FreeBSD-5.1
> system after installing tcl83 and expect (5.38.0) from /usr/ports.
> After setting up a small group of (mostly) Cisco 26xx and 72xx
> routers to be polled, on subsequent runs of rancid I saw oscillating
> sets of diffs like these:
>
> RUN1:
>     [ on router1 ]
>     - snmp-server contact <email>
>     + snmp-server contaact <email>
>
>     [on router2]
>     - tacacs-server host 644.124.X.Y
>     + tacacs-server host 64.124.X.Y
>
>     [on router3]
>     - taacacs-server host <foo>
>     + tacacs-server host <foo>
>
> RUN2:
>     [on router1]
>     - snmp-server contaact <foo>
>     + snmp-server contact <foo>
>
>     [on router2]
>     - tacacs-server host 64.124.X.Y
>     + tacacs-server host 644.124.X.Y
>
>     [on router3]
>     - tacacs-server host <foo>
>     + taacacs-server host <foo>


I have an update on this problem.  As you may remember, I saw this
behavior on both FreeBSD-5.1 and -5.2 systems.  On the -5.2 system,
I forced rancid to use ssh instead of telnet.  Since making that
change, I have not seen any of these duplicate characters, and I've
run rancid 15-20 times now which should have been enough.

Reading this:

    http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/cvsweb.cgi/src/usr.bin/telnet/Makefile

makes me wonder if the changes mentioned in 1.22 might have something
to do with this issue.  This could (in theory) explain why no one
could duplicate the problem we saw; perhaps due to our choices during
installation we got a different version of /usr/bin/telnet.

Anyway, the next step is to build a different telnet binary and see
if the behavior changes.  Obviously we can run rancid with ssh instead
of telnet without any problems, but it'd be nice to know *why* this
happened in the first place.


--Jeff