Topic: errors rotating logs

[Eric Womack]

I got this error emailed to me today:

errors occured while rotating /var/log/xferlog {

proftpd: no process killed
error running postrotate script

Normally I would wait a few days to see if it was just a random error on the sever was too busy or something, but a friend of mine got the same error on his server as well.  Both of us have recently done the update, but that was a couple of days ago.  Is their anything I should do?

Eric

[admin]

yes, I received the same thing today. I only received it on the machine that has recently had the 401 patch added:

errors occured while rotating /var/log/xferlog {

proftpd: no process killed
error running postrotate script

[Damien Curtain]

Eric Womack wrote:

> I got this error emailed to me today:
>
> errors occured while rotating /var/log/xferlog {
>
> proftpd: no process killed error running postrotate script
>
> Normally I would wait a few days to see if it was just a random
> error on the sever was too busy or something, but a friend of
> mine got the same error on his server as well.  Both of us have
> recently done the update, but that was a couple of days ago.
> Is their anything I should do?

No. You can safely ignore the message above. What has been going on is that logrotate is being run, and if you look in /etc/logrotate.d/proftp, youll see the following entry

/var/log/xferlog {
    postrotate
        /usr/bin/killall -HUP proftpd
    endscript
}

now that is what is being run, killall -HUP proftpd. Why this isnt working is that proftpd is run via inetd, not as a standalone server. If it was a standalone server the above command would run fine, and proftpd would resume logging correctly after a logrotate has occurred. You do not have the server running in this mode on e-smith, so you can safely ignore the message your getting.

Regards
--
 Damien