[liboping] liboping assertion failure

[Florian Forster]

Hi Alex,

On Tue, Oct 21, 2008 at 05:49:40PM +1100, Alex Brooks wrote:
> liboping.c:168: ping_timeval_sub: Assertion `(res->tv_sec > 0) || ((res->tv_sec == 0) && (res->tv_usec > 0))' failed.

oh, that's not good :/

> Any idea why this might be happening?

What's done here is that time is measured using these `struct timeval'.
They have a split up second and sub-second part, so adding to such a
struct or subtracting one from another is not as easy as it could be.

The assertion checks that the time stores in `res' is positive, so I
guess that before that two values were subtracted, possibly to calculate
the time between sending and receiving a packet. The name of the
function is kind of a give-away, too ;)

As just before that assertion, there is a sanity check:

  if ((tv1->tv_sec < tv2->tv_sec)
      || ((tv1->tv_sec == tv2->tv_sec)
        && (tv1->tv_usec < tv2->tv_usec)))
    return (-1);

The only way I can see this running into the assertion is by having
`tv1' and `tv2' holding the same value. You can try to change the
assertion to:

  assert ((res->tv_sec > 0) || ((res->tv_sec == 0) && (res->tv_usec >= 0)));
  /* note the `greater than or equal' in `res->tv_usec >= 0' */

Apart from that programming mistake this might be caused by a clock
being set back. Is that some virtual machine you experience this on? Did
you notice any time-specific stuff on any of those machines? To you run
NTPd or ntpdate?

> I'll try harder to get a better bead on it with a core dump,

That's be really useful. Especially the value of the members in `res'
would be interesting.

Regards,
-octo
-- 
Florian octo Forster
Hacker in training
GnuPG: 0x91523C3D
http://verplant.org/
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