Public bug reported:
Binary package hint: sysklogd
** First some background information:
About a year ago I enabled syslog to listen on my private LAN so I could
forward syslog message from my OpenWTR (linux) NAT router and save it on
my workstation (to debug an intermittent problem with the ADSL PPPoE
handshake). To make sure I'd get all logs from the router in a single
place I added the following line in syslog.conf:
*.* /var/log/everything.log
** The first side effects of the bug:
A few months ago I started having login issues, both with local (console
and GUI) login and ssh. I added a bare root shell (no login) on tty12 to
debug when it happens and I finally found out timeouts were occurring
while reading /var/log. It turned out I had millions of files with a few
random .0, .2, .3, .4 or .gz extentions and logins were timing out while
trying to read that folder (probably somewhere in the pam/logging code.
I knew it was something with the log rotation scripts but didn't had
time to find the culprit until now. I was working around it with a
periodic:
rm -f /var/log/*.{[0-9],gz}.{[0-9],gz}
** The root cause:
It turns out /etc/cron.weekly/sysklogd runs '/usr/sbin/syslogd-listfiles
--weekly' to get its list of log files and the above syslog.conf line
cause it to return '*.*' among the list!
I quickly looked at /usr/sbin/syslogd-listfiles without trying much to
find the proper fix, but I also noted that comments starting with a
whitespace before the # are also included in the files list.
Given the impact this bug can have on the system (causing login
timeouts) and the little work required to fix it I believe it should be
treated as urgent.
** Affects: sysklogd (Ubuntu)
Importance: Undecided
Status: New
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Bug in syslogd-listfiles causing insane log rotation
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/204498
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