OpenAFS Fileserver 1.4.10-1.4.11 Source Code Patch Available

Sine Nomine Associates has announced that a patch to correct an error discovered in the OpenAFS 1.4.10-1.4.11 fileserver which can lead to intermittent fileserver crashes is now available.

An abnormal termination of a fileserver will cause a service outage. The bosserver will trigger a salvage and then restart the fileserver process.

AFFECTED SOFTWARE
OpenAFS 1.4.10 - 1.4.11 fileserver on all supported platforms

CORRECTIVE ACTIONS
Sites running OpenAFS 1.4.10-1.4.11 are strongly encouraged to deploy the corrected fileserver. A source code patch for is available online

If you have any questions, please open a support ticket by sending email to support at sinenomine.net.

DETAILS
An error has been discovered in the OpenAFS 1.4.10 and 1.4.11 fileserver handling of multi-homed client hosts which can lead to an abnormal process termination.

An AFS client host may have multiple interfaces, and hence multiple IP addresses. The fileserver attempts to associate these IP address to the host in memory. This multi-home tracking has been improved in recent releases of OpenAFS, however a subtle error was introduced. When the last address associated with a host is removed, the callback connection for that host was also removed. In some cases that connection object was still in use by other threads, and the premature removal of the connection object would lead to a server termination.

The corrective patch eliminates the premature removal of the connection object.