Bug 632853

Summary: smolt profile corrupted and incorrect
Product: [openSUSE] openSUSE 11.3 Reporter: Peter Gumbrell <peter>
Component: BasesystemAssignee: Carlos Gonçalves <cgoncalves>
Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX QA Contact: E-mail List <qa-bugs>
Severity: Normal    
Priority: P5 - None CC: cgoncalves, puzel
Version: Final   
Target Milestone: Final   
Hardware: Other   
OS: openSUSE 11.2   
Whiteboard:
Found By: --- Services Priority:
Business Priority: Blocker: ---
Marketing QA Status: --- IT Deployment: ---

Description Peter Gumbrell 2010-08-19 15:10:45 UTC
User-Agent:       Opera/9.80 (X11; Linux i686; U; en-GB) Presto/2.6.30 Version/10.60

I just upgraded from openSUSE 11.2 to 11.3 and visited my old Smolt profile page (http://www.smolts.org/client/show/?uuid=pub_a9dceb9c-54e5-443a-97b0-44ca3bb28695) to see if it was possible to update it instead of creating a new one. The system info presented on that page contains several completely incorrect details that I never submitted and which wouldn't make sense for somebody else to have changed. Indeed, it seems to not be my profile at all, it is for an entirely different system. For example, it indicates an HP laptop with Spanish localisation and a Core Duo processor, when in fact this profile was submitted from a Sony Vaio laptop in English with a Pentium M single core.

Only the software entries (i.e operating system, kernel, etc.) are relevant. I don't understand how or why this has happened, but it would appear that either somebody has intercepted the account or there is a bug causing profiles to be overwritten.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1.
2.
3.



(I don't know which category to file this report in.)
Comment 1 Marcus Rückert 2010-08-19 15:33:03 UTC
nothing to do with infrastructure at all
Comment 2 Carlos Gonçalves 2010-08-19 21:58:46 UTC
The only reason I can come up with is that your generated UUID and the other's person who submitted and have overwritten your profile were the same. Weird, I must say since it's a long shot (3 × 10^38 combinations).

Nevertheless, to make sure there is no bug in the generated UUIDs (eg, I've been told that all Fedora 7 installations had the same UUID due to the way they were handling the builds of live CDs), please re-submit your profile and check if the same problem occurs again. I'll close this bug report as WORKSFORME but feel free to reopen it.

Thank you for submitting your hardware and software profile to Smolt!
Comment 3 Peter Gumbrell 2010-08-30 11:55:31 UTC
It looks like this may be a more widespread problem. I administer another machine on which I saved a Smolt profile ID earlier this year, and I just looked that one up:

http://www.smolts.org/client/show/pub_a9dceb9c-54e5-443a-97b0-44ca3bb28695

It too bears no relation to the system it was submitted from. It may be just coincidence or symbolic of profiles being regularly overwritten, but that profile was updated just yesterday. More peculiarly, it states openSUSE 11.3 as the system yet the kernel is the 2.6.31 version that shipped with 11.2.

I think this points to either deliberate re-allocation of profile strings (but why would that be necessary?) or a bigger problem with the system, or perhaps even some hacking. The chances of this being two coincidences by your previous equation would now be, what, 3 × 10^38^38? (I'm no expert, you do the maths) :)
Comment 4 Carlos Gonçalves 2010-08-30 21:04:51 UTC
Peter, how did you installed openSUSE (medium)? Can you please provide us your private UUID? It's in /etc/sysconfig/hw-uuid.

Thanks for have taken the time to bring this up again. Really appreciated.
Comment 5 Peter Gumbrell 2010-09-01 12:20:44 UTC
Thought I was going mad for a while and getting data mixed up copying between machines, but I think I've figured it out now. Only just realised that the two profile URLs I posted above are identical, because I've found the hw-uuid strings on those machines are also identical (though the uuid's are different). The hw-uuid is:
c465bd34-e555-48db-8f2a-4025b6470332
and the password is the same.

Both of these profiles were submitted on machines that were installed from the official openSUSE 11.2 KDE CD. Though I know nothing about how these things work, it looks like the same hw-uuid is issued on every installation, which is why the profile has been overwritten again and again by another user with their own hardware details every time I check that page. That would mean all Smolt profiles submitted at least from 11.2 KDE CD users (don't know about DVD / Gnome) have been overwritten, unless they got logged and stored somewhere else.
Comment 6 Carlos Gonçalves 2010-09-02 11:30:21 UTC
It seems that we were hit by the same issue Fedora 7 had (see comment #2).

c465bd34-e555-48db-8f2a-4025b6470332 had over 900 unique IP's. Others are:
118 /client/pub_uuid/c465bd34-e555-48db-8f2a-4025b6470332
613 /client/pub_uuid/1bb2c57f-ee59-42f0-bd3d-b7811c1e0fba
1171 /client/pub_uuid/e6e33e57-2f71-4931-bf78-8537a4257607

I'll investigate how we can workaround this.
Comment 7 Peter Gumbrell 2013-06-17 05:23:37 UTC
This bug can be closed. I believe the Smolt service is no longer functional and was removed entirely in 12.3. Not sure I'm supposed / allowed to close a bug myself.
Comment 8 Peter Gumbrell 2017-03-26 12:49:20 UTC
Per my previous comment, closing this as no longer relevant.