Bug 447022

Description of problem:

Logrotate doesn't rotate logs if /var/lib/logrotate.status is corrupted. It
gives you an error message and terminates, without rotating the logs.

This issue got me once when, after a reboot, /var/lib/logrotate.status became
corrupted. The machine stopped to rotate the logs, but as it was a very busy
mail server, I started having issues with the machine and it took me quite some
time to find out that it was related to the fact that the logs were not rotated
and that logrotate was not working because that file was corrupted.

As for some machines logrotate is quite vital, and as the issue will not fix
itself without administrator intervention, I believe it would be more useful if
the default behaviour would be to recreate the corrupt file (since obviously
that's the only sensible thing to do) and force log rotation anyway.



Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable):

logrotate-3.7.4-8



How reproducible:

Always.



Steps to Reproduce:
1. Take a log that rotates based on size. For instance I'm using yum.log, which
is configured to rotate with "size 30k" here.
# cat /etc/logrotate.d/yum 
/var/log/yum.log {
    missingok
    notifempty
    size 30k
    create 0600 root root
}
2. Fill the log with more than 30k of data
# ls -l /var/log/yum.log
-rw------- 1 root root 49825 May 16 20:40 /var/log/yum.log
3. Corrupt the contents of logrotate.status
# dd if=/dev/random bs=1k count=1 of=/var/lib/logrotate.status 
0+1 records in
0+1 records out
128 bytes (128 B) copied, 0.000158 seconds, 810 kB/s
4. Run logrotate
# logrotate /etc/logrotate.conf 
error: bad top line in state file /var/lib/logrotate.status
5. Check that the log didn't rotate
# ls -l /var/log/yum.log
-rw------- 1 root root 49825 May 16 20:40 /var/log/yum.log
6. (Admin intervention) Remove logrotate.status
# rm -fv /var/lib/logrotate.status 
removed `/var/lib/logrotate.status'
7. Run logrotate again
# logrotate /etc/logrotate.conf 
#
(no errors this time)
8. Check that the log rotated
# ls -l /var/log/yum.log /var/log/yum.log.1 
-rw------- 1 root root     0 May 16 20:42 /var/log/yum.log
-rw------- 1 root root 49825 May 16 20:40 /var/log/yum.log.1


  
Actual results:

error: bad top line in state file /var/lib/logrotate.status
Logs are not rotated



Expected results:

Logs should be rotated anyway.

The file logrotate.status should be removed or renamed. The program should
probably issue an error message anyway, so that a cautious admin could go and
check everything.

Logs that rotate periodically (daily, weekly, monthly, yearly) should probably
be rotated at that time, if the status file is deemed corrupt. I consider that
rotating the logs is a safer measure than not rotating them. I see the harm in
rotating too much is smaller than the harm in not rotating them at all.



Additional info:

N/A