[Bug 1644996] Re: logrotate config uses syslog group

[Mantas Kriaučiūnas]

This bug doesn't exist in Debian, it's only Ubuntu related workaround for Ubuntu 14.04 (Trusty), see LP bug #1258202

logrotate (3.8.6-1ubuntu2) trusty; urgency=low
  * debian/logrotate.conf: use group 'syslog' by default when rotating logs,
    otherwise logrotate will refuse to rotate logs in /var/log whose owning
    group is now syslog instead of root.  LP: #1258202.

 -- Steve Langasek <steve.langasek at ubuntu.com>   Thu, 05 Dec 2013
10:35:47 -0800

Ubuntu developers, please change /etc/logrotate.conf line
su root syslog
to
su root adm

Or maybe we can remove this line from /etc/logrotate.conf , because in
Debian logrotate package there are no such line since 2013 ...

** Tags added: bionic regression-release xenial

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Title:
  logrotate config uses syslog group

Status in logrotate package in Ubuntu:
  Confirmed

Bug description:
  The default logrotate config uses the "syslog" group.

  > # use the syslog group by default, since this is the owning group
  > # of /var/log/syslog.
  > su root syslog

  This is not correct anymore since 16.04, because:

  1. "syslog" group doesn't exist on a stock Ubuntu 16.04 system, it only gets installed via rsyslog
  2. The owning group is actually "adm".

  This results in logrotate terminating with the following error during
  cron.daily run:

  
  run-parts -v /etc/cron.daily
  run-parts: executing /etc/cron.daily/logrotate
  error: /etc/logrotate.conf:7 unknown group 'syslog'

  And can be fixed by changing syslog to adm group.

  This is not present when rsyslog is installed, but only because that package creates the syslog group. This is a common bug in lighter environments, like Docker, where syslog-ng is a common choice instead of rsyslog, like in this issue: 
  https://github.com/phusion/baseimage-docker/issues/338

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