logrotate script freezes anacron

[Andy Balaam]

Binary package hint: lastfmsubmitd

lastfmsubmitd places a file in /etc/logrotate.d called lastfmsubmitd, which looks like this:

/var/log/lastfm/*.log {
        weekly
        missingok
        rotate 7
        postrotate
                invoke-rc.d --quiet lastfmsubmitd force-reload > /dev/null
                invoke-rc.d --quiet lastmp force-reload > /dev/null
        endscript
        compress
        notifempty
}

This appears to work fine sometimes, but sometimes one of the commands redirected to /dev/null appears to output something on stderr, which is not redirected. In at least some cases, this causes logrotate to freeze, becoming "[defunct]" in the ps -ef output.

This frozen logrotate process sits there forever, preventing cron.daily from running, which is a very serious problem.

I think the fix is to change the file to look like this:

/var/log/lastfm/*.log {
        weekly
        missingok
        rotate 7
        postrotate
                invoke-rc.d --quiet lastfmsubmitd force-reload > /dev/null 2>&1
                invoke-rc.d --quiet lastmp force-reload > /dev/null 2>&1
        endscript
        compress
        notifempty
}

so the stderr output is also piped to /dev/null.

[Daniel T Chen (crimsun)]

Is this symptom still reproducible in 8.10 beta or later?

[Andy Balaam (mail-artificialworlds)]

I'm afraid I'm still on 8.04 so I can't investigate that. Has something changed that might have fixed it?

[rusivi2 (rusivi2-deactivatedaccount)]

Thank you for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better. I noticed that the package version your bugging is updated in Maverick. As well, you could use virtualbox to re-engineer the circumstances under which this issue occurred. Please update via www.ubuntu.com repost a detailed error report, and update the bug status. Thanks!