Misleading "Symbol already defined" error

Martin Weinelt martin at darmstadt.freifunk.net
Sun Feb 2 17:38:01 CET 2020


Hi,

i was debugging this on and off for the last 36 hours and found the 
error message quite misleading.

[root at ganymede:/etc/bird]# cat bird2.conf
router id 172.23.42.3;
protocol device {
   scan time 10;
};
[root at ganymede:/etc/bird]# bird -c bird2.conf -p
bird: bird2.conf:1:1 Symbol already defined

[root at ganymede:/etc/bird]# bird --version
BIRD version 2.0.7


But the error is not due to birds config file, it is due to a duplicate 
entry in /etc/iproute2/rt_tables definitions.

[root at ganymede:/etc/bird]# ltrace bird -c bird2.conf -p
[...]
strcmp("ipt_igpt", "ipt_igpt") = 0
strlen("Symbol already defined") = 22
[...]


Took me quite some time to find this and I would appreciate if the error 
message could be improved.


Best regards,

Martin


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