logrotate problem

[Olsson Mattias <mattias olsson siemens com>]

Hi

Hope somebody can help me:)



We specify the rotation of the logfile maillog as follows:

/var/log/maillog {
    rotate 7
    daily
    compress
    postrotate
           /bin/kill -HUP `cat /var/run/syslogd.pid 2> /dev/null` 2>
/dev/null || true
    endscript
}


For some reason the command doesn't succeed, i.e. the signal never reaches
the syslog daemon.
Consequently, syslogd will continue to write to a INODE that no longer has a
file pointer
effectively resulting is log data being lost.

However, if the command is modified to:

sleep 1; /bin/kill -HUP `cat /var/run/syslogd.pid 2> /dev/null` 2> /dev/null
|| true

the problem disappears.

The easiest way to test this is to do the following commands when
configurating
the logfile /var/log/maillog as given above:

#/usr/sbin/logrotate -f /etc/logrotate.conf
#ls -l /var/log/maillog

Note that the size is 0

#logger -p mail.info -t info TESTING
#ls -l /var/log/maillog

Note that the size is still 0

#/bin/kill -HUP `cat /var/run/syslogd.pid 2> /dev/null`
#logger -p mail.info -t info TESTING
#ls -l /var/log/maillog

Note that the size no longer is 0


Thanks /Mattias