[Bug 1646818] [NEW] logrotate randomly fails with 'File exists'

[Launchpad Bug Tracker]

You have been subscribed to a public bug:

I have a bunch of Ubuntu 14.04 cloud-based servers and they randomly and
intermittently fail during logrotate (3.8.7-1ubuntu1) with the following
email being returned via cron:

    /etc/cron.daily/logrotate:                                                      
    error: error creating output file /var/log/syslog.1.gz: File exists             
    run-parts: /etc/cron.daily/logrotate exited with return code 1                  

Once in this state, it appears that the affected log(s) never get
rotated from then on, resulting in the disk gradually filling up:

$ ls -l /var/log/syslog*
-rw-r----- 1 syslog adm 728263740 Dec  2 12:41 /var/log/syslog
-rw-r----- 1 syslog adm  16794619 Oct 19 05:17 /var/log/syslog.1
-rw-r----- 1 syslog adm    704512 Oct 20 05:16 /var/log/syslog.1.gz
-rw-r----- 1 syslog adm   1361774 Oct 18 05:05 /var/log/syslog.2.gz
-rw-r----- 1 syslog adm   1367745 Oct 17 05:01 /var/log/syslog.3.gz
-rw-r----- 1 syslog adm   1347087 Oct 16 04:50 /var/log/syslog.4.gz
-rw-r----- 1 syslog adm   1331506 Oct 15 04:50 /var/log/syslog.5.gz
-rw-r----- 1 syslog adm   1349794 Oct 14 05:10 /var/log/syslog.6.gz
-rw-r----- 1 syslog adm   1359010 Oct 13 05:10 /var/log/syslog.7.gz

Note that I also sometimes get an error report "gzip: stdin: file size
changed while zipping" which may or may not be related.

These servers are not related and have very minimal changes from an out-
of-the-box Ubuntu server 14.04 bare install (basically: bind9, postfix,
python3 and unattended-upgrades are installed and configured), so this
is presumably affecting all Ubuntu users and would seem quite serious.
Disks filling up can prevent services running of course, but also
prevent security patches being applied so this is effectively a security
issue.

** Affects: logrotate (Ubuntu)
     Importance: Undecided
         Status: New

-- 
logrotate randomly fails with 'File exists'
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1646818
You received this bug notification because you are a member of Ubuntu Foundations Bugs, which is subscribed to logrotate in Ubuntu.