Deeply buried 16-year-old SQLite bug caused last year's Tailscale outages

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Think your bugs are a pain to track? WAL-Reset took six months of hunting and development of a new logging tool to identify

Users of peer-to-peer networking outfit Tailscale might have struggled through some surprising outages beginning late last year. After a six-month investigation, the team finally knows why: A bug in SQLite’s write-ahead log that had remained hidden for 16 years.

The Tailscale team announced in a Wednesday blog post that it had finally addressed the issue with the help of SQLite maintainers, who even had to create a new tool (with Tailscale funding) to log virtual file system activity in order to track the thing down, which Tailscale software engineer Alex Chan described as resisting “all our initial attempts to find it.”

According to Chan, the problem goes deep into the nature of SQLite – so deep that the database maintainers actually had to add code to reproduce...

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