I got the following error using 1.4.12:

[1:1]: RangeError: attempt to write beyond buffer bounds
at Buffer.write (buffer.js:343:11)
at packElement (/home/dev/GitHub/appserver-FF/node_modules/mongodb/node_modules/bson/lib/bson/bson.js:475:31)
at serializeObject (/home/dev/GitHub/appserver-FF/node_modules/mongodb/node_modules/bson/lib/bson/bson.js:377:15)
at Function.serializeWithBufferAndIndex (/home/dev/GitHub/appserver-FF/node_modules/mongodb/node_modules/bson/lib/bson/bson.js:343:10)
at BSON.serializeWithBufferAndIndex (/home/dev/GitHub/appserver-FF/node_modules/mongodb/node_modules/bson/lib/bson/bson.js:1556:15)
at QueryCommand.toBinary (/home/dev/GitHub/appserver-FF/node_modules/mongodb/lib/mongodb/commands/query_command.js:230:20)
at Connection.write (/home/dev/GitHub/appserver-FF/node_modules/mongodb/lib/mongodb/connection/connection.js:264:37)
at __executeQueryCommand (/home/dev/GitHub/appserver-FF/node_modules/mongodb/lib/mongodb/db.js:1739:16)
at Db._executeQueryCommand (/home/dev/GitHub/appserver-FF/node_modules/mongodb/lib/mongodb/db.js:1889:7)
at Cursor.nextObject (/home/dev/GitHub/appserver-FF/node_modules/mongodb/lib/mongodb/cursor.js:749:13)
at Cursor.toArray (/home/dev/GitHub/appserver-FF/node_modules/mongodb/lib/mongodb/cursor.js:168:10)

Here is a simple example to demonstrate the problem:

require('mongodb').Db.connect('mongodb://127.0.0.1:27017/test', {}, function (err, db) {
    db.createCollection('collTest', function (err, col) {
        // The problem is a combination of the query being a string
        // instead of an object and the sort parameter being an
        // empty object instead of being undefined.
        col.find('val1').sort({}).toArray(function (err) {
            if (err) { console.log('Here is the error:', err); }
            db.close(true, function (err) {
                console.log('Done.');
            });
        });
    });
});

The problem seems to be a combination of the fact that I pass a string in the find() and an empty object in the sort().

The following commands return without errors:

col.find('val1').sort().toArray(...),
col.find({prop1: 'val1'}).sort({}).toArray(...)
col.find({prop1: 'val1'}).sort().toArray(...)

This problem was introduced in 1.4.3. The code above does not generate an error in 1.4.2.

My stack trace points to the lines added in revision 014e1b0869 .

To solve my problem, I simply had to change the form of my find to use a proper object in the query parameter, but I wanted to tell you about this problem since the error message was very counter-intuitive and it took me some time to figure it out.

Thanks.