Bug 864083

Summary: Possible weakness in pid checking preventing rsyslogd starting ... ?
Product: [Fedora] Fedora Reporter: Tom London <selinux>
Component: rsyslogAssignee: Tomas Heinrich <theinric>
Status: CLOSED WONTFIX QA Contact: Fedora Extras Quality Assurance <extras-qa>
Severity: unspecified Docs Contact:
Priority: unspecified    
Version: 18CC: dwalsh, pvrabec, theinric
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Last Closed: 2014-02-05 12:29:44 UTC Type: Bug
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Description Tom London 2012-10-08 14:25:03 UTC
Description of problem:
rsyslogd checks for the existence of the pidfile '/var/run/syslog.pid', and checks for the existence of the process with the pid contained in that file.

But, my quick check of the source didn't find that it checks to see if that running process actually is 'rsyslogd' (e.g., by checking /proc/PID/comm=="rsyslogd").

It may be a stretch, but I believe if my system does a 'hard shutdown' leaving /var/run/syslog.pid and if subsequent reboots start rsyslogd with a different pid, I get "Pidfile (and pid) already exist." spew if there is a running process with rsyslogd's old pid.

The only workaround I found was to boot single user, remove /var/run/syslog.pid and reboot.

Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable):
rsyslog-5.8.11-3.fc18.x86_64

How reproducible:
Often, if I have to do a hard, "power off" shutdown.

Steps to Reproduce:
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Actual results:


Expected results:


Additional info:

Comment 1 Daniel Walsh 2012-10-19 17:25:53 UTC
Well this might not be a valid problem since /var/run is supposed to be a symlink to /run and /run is now a tmpfs.

Comment 2 Tom London 2012-10-20 16:22:12 UTC
Well, this was caused by my misconfigured system: /var/run was not a symbolic link to /run, so syslog.pid persisted through reboots.

Not sure if fixing the config is a complete solution: I could imagine wanting to restart rsyslogd (say, after it crashes, etc.).

But guessing this would be an upstream issue at best.

Comment 3 Fedora End Of Life 2013-12-21 09:04:24 UTC
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Comment 4 Fedora End Of Life 2014-02-05 12:29:47 UTC
Fedora 18 changed to end-of-life (EOL) status on 2014-01-14. Fedora 18 is
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