Archive for December 11th, 2006



Join me in the fight against breast cancer

Please support me as I take an amazing journey in the fight against breast cancer! The Breast Cancer 3-Day is a 60-mile walk over the course of three days. Net proceeds benefit the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation and the National Philanthropic Trust, funding important breast cancer research, education, screening, and treatment.

Before my dad’s first wife, Dawn Froebe died of breast cancer in 1970, she gave birth to my older sister Kathryn and my brother Michael.  Last year, my mother-in-law (future mother-in-law at the time) wrote Dawn’s name on her shirt as remembrance of her.  My mother-in-law walked the 60 miles last year along with Gwen.

In August of 2007, my wifemother-in-law, Gwen, Melinda and myself will be walking the 60 miles in three days.  My sister-in-law will be part of the 3 Day Crew!  If you can afford it, please pledge a donation to the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation.  Click on the image to make a donation.

If you are going to be using ASE 12.5 or ASE 15 with the upcoming Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.0, there are two CRs that you need to know about:

  1. CR 450004 – XP Server and Backupserver (64bit)
  2. CR 432482 – ASE 15

The problem is the result of using the jmp() and longjmp() functions in the GNU C Library version 2.4 (glibc 2.4).

setjmp() and longjmp() are useful for dealing with errors and interrupts encountered in a low-level subroutine of a program. setjmp() saves the stack context/environment in env for later use by longjmp(). The stack context will be invalidated if the function which called setjmp() returns.

Starting in glibc 2.4, the jmpbuf is unavailable due to a security exploit known for several years.  Restricting access to the jmpbuf was an effort by the glibc maintainers to ‘close this hole’ by forcing the application writers to use the sigsetjmp() and siglongjmp() instead.

The problem with using sigsetjmp() and siglongjmp() is that they aren’t thread safe.  This is supposed to be fixed in glibc 2.6 according to a contact at Sybase but Sybase *does* have a workaround for this issue and will be putting it into the ASE v15 codeline when they perform the RHEL 5 certification sometime next year.

I wasn’t able to find much information the supposed exploit.  I only found a few newsgroup posts that didn’t provide any details.

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