Corrupt active file after newgroup control message

[Toon van der Pas]

Hi,

Recently a new problem developed on our news server.
To document the problem I use the last newgroup control message that
caused the problem (lots of newgroup control messages get processed
correctly).

Today at 12:10 pm dutch time we received a newgroup control message:

Nov 20 12:10:15 news controlchan[19458]: control_newgroup, finet.binaries.keskustelu.sarjakuvat news at finnet.fi news at finnet.fi @05000000517A00012BA40000000000000000@, 10.0.1.100, doit, 1

After processing this message innd stopped:

Nov 20 12:10:16 news innd: k:finet.binaries.keskustelu.sarjakuvat:y:news at finnet.fi
Nov 20 12:10:16 news innfeed[19459]: ME source lost . Exiting
Nov 20 12:10:16 news innfeed[19459]: bit global seconds 73547 offered 0 accepted 0 refused 0 rejected 0 missing 0 accsize 0 rejsize 0 spooled 0 unspooled 0
Nov 20 12:10:16 news innfeed[19459]: ME global seconds 73550 offered 0 accepted 0 refused 0 rejected 0 missing 0 accsize 0 rejsize 0 spooled 0 unspooled 0
Nov 20 12:10:16 news innfeed[19459]: ME finishing at Mon Nov 20 12:10:16 2006

Analysis of the file /usr/local/news/db/active turned up that the
group was added there, but that the record was prefixed by 2117 NULL-
bytes! See below the last part of the hex dump of the active file:

00209780  30 30 30 30 30 30 30 30  30 31 20 79 0a 6e 65 77  |0000000001 y.new|
00209790  73 2e 67 72 6f 75 70 73  2e 70 72 6f 70 6f 73 61  |s.groups.proposa|
002097a0  6c 73 20 30 30 30 30 30  30 30 30 30 33 20 30 30  |ls 0000000003 00|
002097b0  30 30 30 30 30 30 30 31  20 6d 0a 00 00 00 00 00  |00000001 m......|
002097c0  00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00  00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00  |................|
*
0020a000  66 69 6e 65 74 2e 62 69  6e 61 72 69 65 73 2e 6b  |finet.binaries.k|
0020a010  65 73 6b 75 73 74 65 6c  75 2e 73 61 72 6a 61 6b  |eskustelu.sarjak|
0020a020  75 76 61 74 20 30 30 30  30 30 30 30 30 30 30 20  |uvat 0000000000 |
0020a030  30 30 30 30 30 30 30 30  30 31 20 79 0a           |0000000001 y.|

We are running with inn-2.4.3 (I know, it's old).
Does this ring a bell for anybody?

Thanks in advance,
Toon van der Pas.