crashes when syslog is not available

[Marc Tardif]

Binary package hint: postgrey

By default openlog and syslog do croak() if syslog is not available (because of a restart, for example). To make programs using
Sys::Syslog more robust, the 'nofatal' option has been implemented in Sys::Syslog. See bug #17316.

The problem is that postgrey does no enable the nofatal option which causes it to crash. Then, this also causes postfix to stop accepting email.

The solution has been proposed to simply upgrade Net::Server to 0.94: http://lists.ee.ethz.ch/postgrey/msg01245.html

Considering dapper and edgy both use 0.90-1, it might be time for an upgrade.

[Daniel Hahler (blueyed)]

libnet-server-perl is 0.94-1 since Feisty.
For Dapper and Edgy it seems to be required patching libnet-server-perl with this particular bug fix/feature and then doing a SRU (http://wiki.ubuntu.com/SRU).

[Daniel Hahler (blueyed)]

After investigating, 0.94 is still buggy in this regard: it uses "pid,nofatal" as default, but then the validate-regexp does not match it.
It appears to be fixed in 0.97 though. I'll get that into Hardy and then provide a backport of this particular fix for Dapper, Edgy, Feisty and Gutsy.

btw: how does postgrey crash? Would be helpful to have the error here for reference.

[Wouter Hanegraaff (wouter-openoffice)]

> btw: how does postgrey crash? Would be helpful to have the error here
> for reference.

I don't have much data on that. Because of this problem, we now restart
postgrey after the logrotation. However this doesn't work out good in
all situations, sometimes a crashed(?) postgrey instance remains active,
resulting in:

mail.warn.0:Dec 11 06:26:04 mailserver postgrey[29576]: 2007/12/11-06:26:02 Pid_file already exists for running process (29577)... aborting at line 261 in file /usr/share/perl5/Net/Server.pm
mail.warn.0:Dec 16 06:26:17 mailserver postgrey[5804]: 2007/12/16-06:26:02 Can't connect to TCP port 60000 on 127.0.0.1 [Address already in use] at line 88 in file /usr/share/perl5/Net/Server/Proto/TCP.pm
mail.warn.0:Dec 16 06:26:18 mailserver postgrey[5809]: 2007/12/16-06:26:05 Can't connect to TCP port 60000 on 127.0.0.1 [Address already in use] at line 88 in file /usr/share/perl5/Net/Server/Proto/TCP.pm

The restart is executed using /etc/init.d/postgres stop; sleep 5; /etc/init.d/postgres start;

[Scott Kitterman (kitterman)]

libnet-server-perl 0.97 is uploaded to Hardy