thttpd: broken log rotation

[Jonas]

Binary package hint: thttpd

I installed ubuntu 7.04 server and added thttpd using apt-get. At first all seemed fine, webpages were served and entries were added to the logfile. However after a few days I noticed that the logfile /var/log/thttpd were empty. It seems like thttpd is not able to handle the transition when the logfile is rotated and stop writing or begin writing to something like /dev/null.

[Jonas (jonass)]

A brute force workaround that seems to work for me is to replace everything in the postrotate clause in /etc/logrotate.d/thttpd with this:

        /usr/bin/killall thttpd
        /etc/init.d/thttpd restart

The result is:

/var/log/thttpd.log {
    rotate 14
    daily
    compress
    missingok
    delaycompress
    postrotate
        /usr/bin/killall thttpd
        /etc/init.d/thttpd restart
    endscript
}

[frotz (frotz)]

This might be a symptom of bug #123155. The solution is to edit /etc/init.d/thttpd and replace all lines using grep to match this:

    if ps ax | grep -q "^ *$PID "; then

Notice the space and asterisk before $PID and the space after.