Bug#391892: exim4-base: combination of logrotate file and cron.d file result in spurious warning mails

[Stephen Gran]

This one time, at band camp, Marc Haber said:
> On Mon, Oct 09, 2006 at 11:45:49AM +0100, Stephen Gran wrote:
> > So if there is ever an error that results in a write to paniclog, the
> > local admin has to move it out of the way manually?  Or am I
> > misunderstanding you?
> 
> Yes. In case of transient errors (see
> http://www.exim.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=92), it can be configured
> in /etc/default/exim4 that messages that match a noise regexp are not
> reported. In the default, I consider a message that was important to
> be written to the panic log dangerous enough to require the admin to
> manually interfere.

Hmm.  I think I disagree.  Take this sequence of events (this is what
happened to me, in fact):

package upgrade, adding log_selector to the default config.  I already had
log_selector set in a local file.  Automatic rebuild from split_config
resulted in duplicate log_selector lines, and a write to paniclog since
the config file contained a syntax error.

I manually fixed the syntax error, reload exim, move on.

In the morning, I get a 'paniclog has errors' type email.  Investigate,
see it's the problem from yesterday.  OK, no problem, thanks for the
hint.  Move on.

Same message for the rest of eternity, as I expect no more errors to
show up in paniclog.

This is suboptimal, IMHO.  paniclog _is_ rotated if it's greater than
10M, so it's not the case that paniclog isn't rotated until the admin
deals with the problem (which would be one way to go, although I
disagree that it's helpful when you're admin'ning a hundred machines).
It's only true that paniclog isn't rotated until it reaches a certain
size.  I would prefer it if it switched back to daily.  The exim4-base
cron.daily would still send an email before rotation, since it's script
is lexically before logrotate, but the admin doesn't get infinite
repeats.  Frankly, if the admin can't deal with the problem the first
time they see paniclog has errors, they probably aren't going to deal
with it the next hundred times.

Thanks,
-- 
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|   ,''`.                                            Stephen Gran |
|  : :' :                                        sgran at debian.org |
|  `. `'                        Debian user, admin, and developer |
|    `-                                     http://www.debian.org |
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