SUMMARY: syslogd dies after log rotation

Chris Marble (cmarble@orion.ac.hmc.edu)
Fri, 30 Jan 1998 11:35:45 -0800 (PST)

Chris Marble wrote:
>
> Our syslog rotation is failing on Solaris 2.6 and 2.5.1 with syslogd
> patch from early January.
> We use the rotz script from the _Unix System Administration Handbook_ to
> rotate logs daily at 6am. With the the aforementioned OSs we end up
> without a running syslogd after the rotation. When I replaced the
> previous syslogd from before the patch our 2.5.1 system worked fine
> again. Broken syslogd or just different action?

Jody L. Baze said:
This is a well-known problem with 2.6. I've had a bug report
filed with Sun since, oh... November. At least as far as I know, there is no
patch available. It really has nothing to do with rotations, per se, it has
to do with HUP'ing syslogd several times in a row. A race-condition seems to
exist in the code which allows a rather substantial period of time to go by
without a signal handler for HUP. The result, as you've noticed, is that the
default HUP action is taken; syslogd terminates.

What I did:
I replaced the syslogd on my 2.6 boxes with an older syslogd from a 2.5.1
machine. It no longer dies when I do all the kills as part of rotating
logs. My 2.5.1 syslogd had broken when I installed a security patch from
Sun so I had gone back to the syslogd from before that.

-- 
  Chris Marble - HMC UNIX Systems Manager, chris_marble@hmc.edu
  My opinions are my own and probably don't represent anything anyway.