To be fair, the asterisk substitutions were put there by the editor, not the original submitter.

According to the second link, the buffer overflow occurs when using a strcpy;

resbuf->h_name = strcpy (hostname, name);

In my (admittedly limited) recent c coding I've used strlcpy rather than strcpy. Is there a good reason not to use this (or strncpy) in place of strcpy?

resbuf->h_name = strlcpy (hostname, name, sizeof(hostname));

(OK, you may get an error due to a truncated copy, but isn't that is easier to spot and deal with than a potential buffer overflow?)

I'm a European, British, English citizen of the UK and European Union (if that makes sense). I'm rare in that I'm one of the few people in the UK who also feels European. As to age, let's say I remember the last European referendum we had in 1975 (although too young to vote).

I did think about saying 'British' rather than 'European'. (I only use "English" internally to the UK, to distinguish myself from, say, being Scottish or Welsh. It makes me cringe when people use "England" when they mean "Britain" or "The United Kingdom"). It says both "European Union" and "United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland" on my passport.

I don't think I got any of this from my parents!

I had to look up MLK Blvd on Google (I'm European). My inner visual image I got when first reading the scenario in your original post had both crack dealer and hooker being white! I hope that's not being racist.

I don't know. I think it still gets used on an ad hoc basis.

Then again, this is matched by the disturbingly large number of non-Muslims who make unfounded generalised comments about Muslims!

I get the sense that the systemd developers haven't had much experience of using Linux (or anything) in a production environment. That's fair enough, it's not their speciality. However, it should be incumbent upon them to accept feedback from those who do have that experience, and adjust systemd accordingly. I get the impression that is not happening.

In other words they've guessed the Use Cases, not captured them.

I think one of the biggest missed opportunities for Linux was not coming up with a suitable replacement for XP.

Those on XP (and still on XP) just want (and had) something that 'worked'. A suitable Linux distro, that 'looked' and 'felt' like XP, and was as stable as XP (SP3), but could run the latest 'application' software like XP (browser, email client, office package) could've gained traction. Something rock-solid, stable and safe. Unfortunately not to be.

(And I don't know why you were labelled 'flamebait' either.)

Just curious, but what if you want to look at the log in Windows? (you may have a dual-boot system with Windows, for instance). How do you do this? What Windows application do you use?

For text logs, no problems. (I would use Notepad++).

The following article may help;

How to convert between ASCII and EBCDIC character codes

There are also commercial products you can buy. As you're running a mainframe, you should be able to afford one of these.

Hope this helps.

As it happens I do run PostgreSQL (albeit just to play with). The data files I can't read in a text editor. However the log file I can!

Text files might take too long to read (and that's a value judgement), but even if true, that's better than not being able to read them at all.

So what software is available for reading systemd binary journal files on Windows? Saying "write your own" is a cop-out.

Plenty of applications for reading text files though. Notepad++ is my favourite. (I've even got it running in Linus using Wine!)

For systemd to truly replace existing init systems, it needs stand-alone journal-readers for other (non-systemd) systems. Ideally, the systemd people should write these - they're the ones forcing through the binary logs.

This is good news. Now we know the underlying cause for 65% of cancers, Big Pharma can start the necessary research on creating a drug to prevent Bad Luck.

I'm sure any viable drug would be a best seller (for those lucky enough to be able to afford it).

Remembering back to the dim and distant past, yes us boys read the Hobbit (and the Lord of the Rings itself) when that age. Also, as I remember, reading interest was kept alive by the works of such authors as Sven Hassel and Ian Fleming. Just about readable with just enough sex and violence to keep us interested!

Of course, we got to know of these latter authors from older boys, not from teachers!