[Bug 1964881] Re: Logging/Log rotation does not work for catalina.out

[Evren Yurtesen]

> I still don't see a nice way out what will work without any delta at
all in ubuntu.

"nice way" is relative. It seems the most common way for Debian to
create logs is as root:adm. Is there any rule which says catalina.out
must be owned by tomcat?

Consider the "jetty9" package in Debian. Rsyslog creates and writes logs
of it to /var/log/jetty9 with root:adm ownership. In logrotated conf, it
has "create 640 jetty adm" but it does nothing due to "copytruncate".
But more importantly, nobody seems to care that `jetty' user does not
own the logs.

Basically fix for tomcat9, is to simply remove 'fileOwner="tomcat"' from
Debian and 'fileOwner="syslog"' from Ubuntu logrotate.d/tomcat9.conf
Then why would there be a need for Delta? The only thing required is
that Debian should accept `tomcat` rsyslog logs to have root:adm
ownership.

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Title:
  Logging/Log rotation does not work for catalina.out

Status in tomcat9 package in Ubuntu:
  In Progress
Status in tomcat9 source package in Focal:
  Confirmed
Status in tomcat9 source package in Jammy:
  Confirmed

Bug description:
  In Ubuntu 20.04, with `tomcat9-9.0.31-1ubuntu0.1` (latest) package, `logrotated` is not able to write to `/var/log/tomcat/catalina.out`
  This could be fixed in a newer package but was not backported:
  https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/tomcat9/+bug/1861881

  In Ubuntu 22.04, with `tomcat9-9.0.58-1` (latest)  package,
  `logrotated` is not able to rotate `/var/log/tomcat/catalina.out`

  Because the `catalina.out` is created with `syslog:adm` ownerships.
  `syslog` user does not have enough permissions to change this.

  This causes following error:

  rsyslogd: error during config processing: omfile: chown for file
  '/var/log/tomcat9/catalina.out' failed: Operation not permitted
  [v8.2112.0 try https://www.rsyslog.com/e/2207 ]

  At the same time, the  `/etc/logrotate.d/tomcat9` has `su tomcat adm`
  directive. Therefore the `logrotated` is not able to truncate the
  `/var/log/tomcat/catalina.out`

  This causes logrotate to copy the contents of `/var/log/tomcat/catalina.out` to as if it would be rotated. As `catalina.out` is never truncated, each rotated file ends up having the contents of `catalina.out` from the beginning of the tomcat installation. This causes the log sizes to keep increasing as no actual log rotation is being done.
  --- 
  ProblemType: Bug
  ApportVersion: 2.20.11-0ubuntu79
  Architecture: amd64
  CasperMD5CheckResult: pass
  DistroRelease: Ubuntu 22.04
  InstallationDate: Installed on 2022-02-27 (18 days ago)
  InstallationMedia: Ubuntu 22.04 LTS "Jammy Jellyfish" - Alpha amd64 (20220121)
  Package: tomcat9 9.0.58-1
  PackageArchitecture: all
  ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 5.15.0-18.18-generic 5.15.12
  RebootRequiredPkgs: Error: path contained symlinks.
  Tags:  jammy
  Uname: Linux 5.15.0-18-generic x86_64
  UpgradeStatus: No upgrade log present (probably fresh install)
  UserGroups: N/A
  _MarkForUpload: True

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