Coverity reported an Uninitialized pointer read. Upon further digging it appears that there is a code path where incoming packets can come in out of order, so this section of code tries to see if it can find the missed packets. As per FS-5202 there is a case where under heavy load the packet exists, and has most of the packet parsed, but still has a NULL pointer for the packet buffer. These two lines would at least help detect the edge case.
My bad. some how a make didn't catch this issue after a cleanup refactor. In this instance buf is being treated as an 8 byte number, not a pointer.
Was causing a very small leak on naptr lookups. Upon review just happened to be a typo missing a bang.