[avahi] Avahi daemon dies on certain hostnames

Lennart Poettering lennart at poettering.net
Fri Mar 31 17:06:46 PST 2006


On Fri, 31.03.06 16:29, Marc Krochmal (marc at apple.com) wrote:

> >Hmm. While Avahi shouldn't die when such a host name appears on the
> >network it's primarily a bug in the axis cameras. They shouldn't send
> >hostnames with invalid UTF-8 characters in the first place. However, I
> >don't know what to do in such a case. Ignore the hostanem entirely
> >because it isn't valid UTF-8? Treat is as ISO8859-1 if it doesn't
> >validate as UTF8?
> >
> >I think i will simply write a message to syslog and ignore the RRs
> >which contains such bogus host names. What do you think?
> 
> Couldn't you just allow the UTF-8 hostname but log a warning  
> message?  UTF-8 is a valid encoding scheme for mDNS in general, just  
> in practice, hostnames are traditionally restricted to letter,  
> digits, hyphens so as to make them easy to type into command-line  
> interfaces.

The problem is not with host names that are proper UTF8 names. Those
are supported properly right now. The problem appears with host names
that contain characters that are not valid in UTF8. Avahi doesn't
check for this right now, but the IPC system we use (DBUS) does and
runs amok.

(At least that's what I understood)

See 

http://www.dwheeler.com/secure-programs/Secure-Programs-HOWTO/character-encoding.html

for more information about valid and invalid UTF8 sequences.

Lennart

-- 
Lennart Poettering; lennart [at] poettering [dot] net
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