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

[Marc Haber]

On Mon, Oct 09, 2006 at 01:14:59PM +0100, Stephen Gran wrote:
> This one time, at band camp, Marc Haber said:
> > 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.

Mistake here. Rotate panicloc is missing. The paniclog should always
be empty, and if it's not, that is alarm signal. Upstream docs suggest
this mode of operation.

> 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,

That's a side effect and cannot be relied on. Additionally, it would
only send a _single_ e-mail.

>  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.

I tend to forget taking care of some things.

Admins who are that good that they only need to be alarmed once can
edit the logrotate.d file.

Greetings
Marc

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