live Installer may rotate syslog during install and copy only a portion to /target/var/log/installer/syslog

[Joel Ebel]

The Ubuntu Live CD includes the sysklogd package, which is used for logging the install to /var/log/syslog. The syslog is copied to /target/var/log/installer/syslog at the end of installation. The sysklogd package installs a syslog rotation script into /etc/cron.weekly/sysklogd which runs at 6:47 AM on Sunday. If an install happens to span across this time, then the log gets rotated during the install. As a result, the syslog that gets copied to /target/var/log/installer/syslog doesn't contain the entire installer log.

I'm seeing this in the intrepid installer. It may exist in previous versions, but I didn't check. I'm not certain what component to file the bug under, since it's a file from the sysklogd package that's causing the problem, but the problem is specific only to the install cd.

To reproduce, run an install when the computer's clock is going to pass 6:47 AM on a sunday morning and observe the log file after the install finishes. One would expect the see the entire installer log, but in fact only sees the portion that occured after log rotation.

I propose that the live cd either does not rotate logs, or that log rotation be disabled during an installation.

TEST CASE
1) Boot Live CD to Try Ubuntu
2) Adjust Date one day into the future
3) Execute 'sudo /etc/cron.daily/logrotate'
4) Observe 2 syslog files in /var/log/

[Joel Ebel (jbebel)]

As stated in the description, I don't believe this should be targeted to the sysklogd source package, as it's not a bug in sysklogd. It's a bug in the Live CD, but I don't know what component in launchpad is responsible for that.

[Joel Ebel (jbebel)]

Moving to ubiquity package since I think that's a better place to start.

[Colin Watson (cjwatson)]

(We don't use the ubiquity upstream project for bug tracking, only the ubiquity package in Ubuntu, so I'm marking the upstream task Invalid.)

[Colin Watson (cjwatson)]

I agree that this would be a very good thing to fix; I've observed it impeding my ability to diagnose bugs several times. The package that governs live CD startup is casper.

[Brian Murray (brian-murray)]

Looking at all the open ubiquity bug attachments about 32 of them contain a log file with rsyslog being restarted in them.

[Stéphane Graber (stgraber)]

Moving back to ubiquity as we don't want to rotate logs for persistent sessions.
Instead ubiquity should stop logrorate before installing and start it again afterwards, easiest way to achieve this is to remove the executable bit from the logrotate binary.

[Marcus Tomlinson (marcustomlinson)]

This release of Ubuntu is no longer receiving maintenance updates. If this is still an issue on a maintained version of Ubuntu please let us know.

[Marcus Tomlinson (marcustomlinson)]

This issue has sat incomplete for more than 60 days now. I'm going to close it as invalid. Please feel free re-open if this is still an issue for you. Thank you.

[Steve Langasek (vorlon)]

The Precise Pangolin has reached end of life, so this bug will not be fixed for that release