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

[john heasley]

Thu, Apr 01, 2004 at 10:33:28AM -0500, Jeff Aitken:
> 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.

I'd try building a telnet without the crypto goo.  but, i suspect your
problem is more likely to be with it's buffer (ring) handling.