Re: C bug of the day

[Hyman Rosen <hyrosen@mail.com>]

Warren W. Gay VE3WWG wrote:
 > The problem ended up in an INFORMIX-7.31 library
 >
 > That little buffer overflow problem cost me 3 months of my life,
 > and was a very expensive mistake for the company to correct.

Oddly enough, the most mysterious bug I had to deal with
recently turned out to be a problem in Sybase ODBC drivers.
I had been programming database code in Visual Basic in Excel.
The company was changing people over from WindowsNT to
Windows2000, and certain of my spreadsheets stopped working.
Stored procedure calls would fail mysteriously. You can only
imagine the number of blind alleys I wandered down trying to
figure out what was going on.

The ultimate culprit? The ODBC driver when invoked from Excel
sent Sybase its host ID in hex. One of the internal stored
procedures of the same trading system would get the host ID,
which Sybase returns as a string, and try to convert it to
decimal. When there happened to be no hex digits in the ID,
everything would be fine. When there were, the conversion
would cause an error, aborting the procedure. On and off,
that bug cost me a couple of months of hair pulling.


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