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I’ve recently been debugging an old project I inherited that features a [mostly] Java server and C++ client. I think it was mostly written 10–15 years ago (Java 6 at the latest), and probably not touched a whole lot since then, so while it’s all too easy to complain about any code, let alone old code, and code written by anyone else (and I will), I do also have respect for the fact that it’s moderately complex and has generally worked for a long time.

Although there’s plenty of low-hanging fruit for improvement in the project, the killer has been an issue seen when the system isn’t started up or shut down in its preferred sequence and speed. I never identified a perfect recipe for reproducing the issue, but basically: sometimes the system would get into a state where some clients would connect, but then the server seemed to essentially stop letting anyone new in. The workaround was to stop all clients (luckily the clients in this case were actually other servers within our [customers’] control), stop the server, start the server, and then start up the clients one by one. This is annoying with four servers; it’s a major pain with 40. (For better or worse, nobody currently has more than that.)
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One of the sites I run, Techware Labs, uses WordPress for its CMS. (As an aside, we previously used our own home-grown CMS, which had a variety of benefits, but didn’t provide quite as much flexibility as we wanted. Rather than putting significant effort into rewriting or massively upgrading it, we decided to leave that heavy lifting to the pros.) We began using WP around May, 2009 (v2.7.1), since which point 17 major releases have occurred (and significantly more minor releases). We selected the Multi-Page Toolkit plugin to paginate articles (since WordPress just sticks the entire post on a single page by default), which seemed reasonable at the time—it was relatively popular, and had been updated a few months prior. Unfortunately, that update a few months prior [to early 2009] is the last update the plugin has received at the time of this writing.

A lot can happen in seven-plus years, especially in a popular software project like WordPress, but miraculously this plugin mostly kept working through it all. Mostly, however, isn’t quite the same as entirely, and some people get cranky when one thing goes wrong. (Take the Hindenburg, for example; why doesn’t anyone talk about its 62 successful flights?)

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If you ready my previous post, you already know that I’ve had frustrating issues with lock-ups in Ubuntu 12.04 on my new Dell OptiPlex 9010, and perhaps related oddities with errors reported in memtest86+. I opened a support ticket with Dell, and they shipped me a replacement system, which arrived today. The spoiler: it didn’t fix my problems. However, in the course of determining that fact, I may have further isolated the issue.

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The History

I’ve been waiting for a while to get a new desktop computer at home. Back in 2006, I was biding my time to replace my dead desktop until the Windows Vista buy your computer now and we’ll give you Vista whenever it comes out program to be officially announced by Dell, and finally bought my OptiPlex 745 Small Form Factor PC (with a nearly top-of-the-line Conroe Core 2 Duo E6600 CPU) in October. Since that date, I’ve been running said computer nearly 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and it’s held up remarkably well.

While I ran Windows XP full time when I got it, I switched to Ubuntu full time (aside from playing through Portal when it came out) whenever I got my hands on Vista. That’s not to come as a condemnation of Vista, as everyone is so quick to do, but it just worked out that way: since I was going to do a fresh install on a fresh hard drive for Vista, it was a perfect opportunity to install Ubuntu alongside. And once Ubuntu was installed, I wanted to keep using it (as I had been full time in the months between my old desktop dying and purchasing that new computer). I preferred the desktop environment, window management, and most of the apps were either the exact same ones I used already on Windows (e.g. Opera, Firefox, Pidgin), or had suitable (if not preferable) replacements, with the exception of Foobar2000 and Media Player Classic (MPC). Things worked well, too!

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I’ll make this brief, but wanted to document my fix to potentially save someone else some aggravation in the future.

I’ve been working on a c++ project utilizing Google protobuf, and at one point ran into an error during application startup (static initialization):

libprotobuf ERROR google/protobuf/descriptor_database.cc:314] Invalid file descriptor data passed to EncodedDescriptorDatabase::Add().
libprotobuf FATAL google/protobuf/descriptor.cc:862] CHECK failed: generated_database_->Add(encoded_file_descriptor, size):
Abort (core dumped)

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I recently developed a new application on my local machine (in Visual Studio/C++ 2008), and then moved it into our source/revision control system at work, IBM/Rational ClearCase (cc). The new app uses some third-party libraries for which we only have DLLs (no source), so I checked those into ClearCase, too. Unfortunately, the first time I made any changes to the version in cc and tried to step through the app in the debugger, I was immediately presented with an unfriendly error and app termination:

Debugger:: An unhandled non-continuable exception was thrown during process load

along with some return code (0xc0000022).

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