tinc - Mar 2013 - send_meta() called with NULL pointer!

Hi,

I am running tinc (1.0.19) on a cluster of around 40 servers (Xen
virtual machines in two geographical locations). Overall it works very
well, however yesterday it crashed on two machines in odd way. I was
still able to ping VPN IPs of other hosts from the two affected
machines but "vpn" interface was not visible when I run ifconfig.
There was also no "tincd" process running (at least ps aux wasn't
showing it). They logged the following for approx. 20 minutes in the
/var/log/syslog:

Mar 27 01:52:14 us16 tinc.vpn[9528]: Flushing meta data to <peer_host>
(xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx port 655) failed: Connection reset by peer

and eventually:

Mar 27 01:53:03 us16 tinc.vpn[9528]: send_meta() called with NULL pointer!

Any suggestions what could be the reason for this crash and if
upgrading to the latest 1.0.20 might prevent it happening in the
future very much appreciated.

Kind regards,
Chris

On Wed, Mar 27, 2013 at 06:50:45AM +0000, Chris Maciejewski wrote:
> I am running tinc (1.0.19) on a cluster of around 40 servers (Xen
> virtual machines in two geographical locations). Overall it works very
> well, however yesterday it crashed on two machines in odd way. I was
> still able to ping VPN IPs of other hosts from the two affected
> machines but "vpn" interface was not visible when I run ifconfig.
> There was also no "tincd" process running (at least ps aux
wasn't
> showing it). They logged the following for approx. 20 minutes in the
> /var/log/syslog:
> 
> Mar 27 01:52:14 us16 tinc.vpn[9528]: Flushing meta data to
<peer_host>
> (xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx port 655) failed: Connection reset by peer
> 
> and eventually:
> 
> Mar 27 01:53:03 us16 tinc.vpn[9528]: send_meta() called with NULL pointer!
> 
> Any suggestions what could be the reason for this crash and if
> upgrading to the latest 1.0.20 might prevent it happening in the
> future very much appreciated.
I don't know the reason for this crash. Could you send me all tinc's log
messages from that day to me privately? That would help me debug the problem.

I do not think upgrading to 1.0.20 might help in this case. You might want to
try 1.1pre6 though, since that is different enough that this bug might not
appear.

-- 
Met vriendelijke groet / with kind regards,
     Guus Sliepen <guus at tinc-vpn.org>
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