rsyslogd holds open stderr fd from environment that ran its init script

[Max Bowsher]

Binary package hint: rsyslog

Chasing the trail of a hung "run-parts --report /etc/cron.daily" with a defunct logrotate child, I found that rsyslogd was holding an open fd to the write end of run-parts' pipe as its stderr.

It seems that rsyslogd is inheriting stderr from the process executing "/etc/init.d/rsyslog reload" and holding it open - this is bad.

ProblemType: Bug
Architecture: amd64
Date: Thu Aug 13 13:42:36 2009
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 9.10
NonfreeKernelModules: nvidia
Package: rsyslog 4.2.0-1ubuntu2
ProcEnviron:
 LANGUAGE=en_GB.UTF-8
 LC_COLLATE=C
 PATH=(custom, user)
 LANG=en_GB.UTF-8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 2.6.31-5.24-generic
SourcePackage: rsyslog
Uname: Linux 2.6.31-5-generic x86_64

[Michael Terry (mterry)]

Here's a merge from Debian to pick up this fix and a few others. I also included a patch from bug 407862 and updated deroot.patch to help issues like bug 401433 (though it won't fix the root cause of that one) by just ignoring /proc/kmsg if we can't read from it, rather than keep trying to read it from the kernel directly.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

This bug was fixed in the package rsyslog - 4.2.0-2ubuntu1

---------------
rsyslog (4.2.0-2ubuntu1) karmic; urgency=low

  [ Michael Terry ]
  * Merge from debian unstable (LP: #413023), remaining changes:
    - Run as rsyslog:rsyslog
    - Allow reading /proc/kmsg when non-root
    - Cleanly upgrade from sysklogd
  * debian/patches/deroot.patch: Don't allow using the klogctl function to
    read klog messages. Rather, allow /proc/kmsg or nothing, since we have
    special support for reading /proc/kmsg while unprivileged.

  [ Neil Wilson ]
  * debian/rsyslog.init: Set blocksize for dd (LP: #407862) and restore
    reload init argument to original lightweight reload

 -- Michael Terry <email address hidden> Thu, 13 Aug 2009 15:43:29 -0400