Renaming client with more than 30 characters crashes Engine

[twickland]

I experienced an annoying bug today while adding a Retrospect client. The client, a Windows 7 machine running client version 7.7.114, was successfully added via direct IP address. I then attempted to change the name to a name containing 31 characters. The name change window accepted the new name, but shortly after I clicked the Change button, the engine crashed. The crash apparently also wiped out the Config80.dat file, because when the engine restarted itself, it had lost a number of configuration changes I had recently made, which suggests it had restarted using Config80.bak. However, Config80.bak apparently was also corrupted in the process, as when I attempted to re-add the client, I got the always-helpful "An error occurred" message.

 

I attempted reverting to ever-earlier backed up copies of Config80.dat (quitting the console and stopping the engine each time, of course), each time experiencing the same engine crashes and Config80 file corruption. It was only after 5 or 6 such attempts that I remembered that we had previously needed to truncate a client name in Retrospect 8. When I shortened the new name to 30 characters, I was finally able to successfully change the name and avoid crashing the engine.

 

Obviously, the Retrospect 9 console either should refuse to accept a longer client name than is acceptable or should handle such an error more gracefully.