[Dovecot] BUG REPORT - Stops logging after sleep
Bill Cole
dovecot-20061108 at billmail.scconsult.com
Sat Sep 8 19:36:13 EEST 2007
At 9:54 AM -0400 9/8/07, Bruce Bodger wrote:
>Timo,
>
>Compiled and installed v1.0.4 this morning on OS X 10.4.10...
>
>./configure --with-ssldir=/System/Library/OpenSSL --with-ssl=openssl
>--with-notify=kqueue
>
>...all is well.
>
>I wonder if you remember the conversation that we had back on May
>11. This was the situation where after the system ran nightly
>maintenance dovecot info stopped appearing in mail.log (I'm being
>careful how I state that: I believe you had surmised a problem with
>Apple's syslogd implementation.
If you run them, you would also note that Postfix, BIND, INN, and
MIMEDefang all suffer from the same problem. In fact, I don't know of
any non-Apple daemon that does not have this problem. I believe it is
a bug in Apple's ground-up re-implementation of system logging in
Tiger.
The condition is a silent failure for clients of the syslog subsystem
using the BSD standard (i.e. portable) API. There's no feedback from
the system to alert a caller to syslog() that the call didn't
actually result in anything getting written to a log file, since the
call returns no value and doesn't set errno. The only way a program
could know of the failure would be to trace the syslog configuration
and look for whether messages are appearing, then take action
(probably calling closelog() and openlog()) as needed. Alternatively,
a program might just do that as housekeeping every few minutes, but
that seems like an awfully busy bit of accommodation for a broken OS
subsystem.
In short: Apple needs to fix this. It's their bug, created by their
decision to replace traditional BSD syslog with fresh new code
written by people who couldn't be bothered to look at what had been
done by others before them or at how their code interoperated with
existing widely used software. Just like the embarrassment called
LaunchD, ASL is the replacement of a *very mature* set of software
with software that in the same metaphor might best be termed
*infantile*. Hopefully both will at least reach juvenile or
adolescent status in Leopard...
--
Bill Cole
bill at scconsult.com
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