Mandrake 7.1 Logrotate Problem

Discovered a huge problem w/Mandrake 7.1 this week (note: Mandrake has a patch for this).
Computer seemed to be doing things sluggishly so I used the 'top' utility to
see what system resources were being used and logrotate was using over 3/4 of
the CPU and had running for a very long period of time.

Looked at the /var/log directory and wow-- the mail and news directories were
huge-- so large that I couldn't even open them to view the directory contents.

I couldn't delete the files w/

shell> rm /var/log/news/* [hung for awhile and said list of arguments too long]

I read somewhere that you could empty the directories by linking them to
/dev/null, but was unable to accomplish this.

So I checked on the web and found this page: http://www.linux-mandrake.com/en/security/2000/MDKA-2000-009-1.php3?dis=7.1
which explained that there was a bug in logrotate.

Solution: update the logrotate package using: logrotate-3.3-9mdk.i586.rpm and
also the sysklogd-1.3.31-19mdk.i586.rpm.

These can be found w/search on http://google.com but please be careful to only
install packages from a trusted source!

sources:
http://www.linux-mandrake.com/en/security/2000/MDKA-2000-009-1.php3?dis=7.1

Jim Miller 08/31/01.
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