Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 73879
RFE: make logrotate robust against terminal wildcards
Last modified: 2015-01-07 19:00:24 EST
Description of Problem: logrotate is too fragile, in facilitating Denial of Service (inode depletion forkbombs) when used with a globbing of [\*]$ in an entry Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): all recent How Reproducible: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=68917 https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=68422 https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=68096 - samba, mgetty, mailman have ALL suffered from this in recent years when a packager who does not understand the danger of ending a rotate argument with [\*]$ builds a /etc/logrotate.d/ entry Additional Information: The requested enhancement is straightforward -- add code in the globbing section expansion loopwalk, thus: | grep -v '[\*][0-9z]$' which will cause it to ignore prior rotated logfiles, both compressed and uncompressed. We do this in several other contexts already -- ignoring *.rpm{new|orig|etc} in /etc/rc.d/init.d and in /etc/sysconfig/entwork-scripts ignoring *~ entries. This is making the system robust against careless packaging, which _keeps_ happening. -- Russ Herrold
ouch -- just got done deleting 120K empty logrotate inodes used (uselessly) on a production host. Any word on this one?
The packages mentioned have been fixed (using wildcards like that is just plain bad). I can't promise a fix in logrotate, but if someone comes up with a patch, I'll look at it.