tomas/prey — Issue #239: Severe crash following swap of SIM card
Author: nagromnewo
Created: 2011-11-07 18:19:23+00:00
State: open

Hi

On Saturday, I travelled from St Martin in the Caribbean to Michigan USA. On the aircraft, I swapped my St Martin SIM for my US SIM. Once the plane had landed in Philadelphia and use of cellular phones was allowed, I turned on my Viewpad 7 (Android 2.2.1) Tablet. I attempted to make a phone call, but could not get through. I put my tablet in my briefcase and left it there until I had cleared customs and was at the gate waiting for my connecting flight. When I pulled the tablet out again, I found that it had continuously scrolling white text on a black background and I could not access my home page or any apps.

I managed to reboot the device using the reset switch. However, as soon as it booted, I was greeted with a message that there was no space available and taken to the app manager page. About halfway into the flight from Philadelphia to Detroit, I finally managed to clear enough space to access the Tablet. This was not easy as all I had access to was the App Manager and all my Apps are installed on the SD via Link2SD, so deleting apps does nothing to free up main memory.

Further investigation found a 24Mb file named /data/logcat_1.log on the device. This file contains almost exclusively data related to Prey. It looks like Prey reacted to the changed SIM card and attempted to report it, but since there was no Internet connection, it failed and kept retrying until the internal memory was swamped. (I did not connect to Wifi, and the US SIM card does not have Data connectivety.)

Not only was this a serious failure of the tablet (I wanted to watch my movie, not troubleshoot a crashed OS on the flight), but if this happened to a stolen tablet, it would almost certainly result in the thief making a hard reset, making it impossible to track the device.

I have a copy of the log file if you need it. I don't see a way to upload it here.

Regards,

Owen Morgan