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KernelCare Logrotate Configuration Fails with "Anacron job 'cron.daily' on $DOMAIN.TLD" Error

Ehsan Dowlatshah
  • Updated

Symptoms

The following notification/alert email is received: 

Subject: Anacron job 'cron.daily' on $DOMAIN.TLD

/etc/cron.daily/logrotate:

error: libcare:3 bad rotation count '5 # keep 5 last archives' 
error: found error in /var/log/libcare/*.log , skipping

 

Description 

The issue is related to an incorrectly formatted comment in this logrotate configuration file from the Kernelcare package: 

cat /etc/logrotate.d/libcare

/var/log/libcare/*.log {

    daily

    rotate 5 # keep 5 last archives

    missingok # it's ok if there is no such file

    notifempty # do nothing if file is empty

    compress

}


As seen here this file is responsible to rotate the log files in this directory: 

/var/log/libcare/


The logrotate command is configured to run every day and when it runs the above configuration is consequently triggered: 

cat /etc/cron.daily/logrotate

#!/bin/sh

export TMPDIR=/var/spool/logrotate/tmp

 

/usr/sbin/logrotate -s /var/lib/logrotate/logrotate.status /etc/logrotate.conf

EXITVALUE=$?

if [ $EXITVALUE != 0 ]; then

    /usr/bin/logger -t logrotate "ALERT exited abnormally with [$EXITVALUE]"

fi

exit 0


You can reproduce the issue by running the above command manually and tailing the cron log file like this: 

/usr/sbin/logrotate -s /var/lib/logrotate/logrotate.status /etc/logrotate.conf; tail -f /var/log/cron

error: libcare:3 bad rotation count '5 # keep 5 last archives'

error: found error in /var/log/libcare/*.log , skipping

Oct  8 06:54:01 server CROND[12752]: (root) CMD (/usr/bin/jetcli backup --run backup > /dev/null 2>&1)

Oct  8 06:54:01 server CROND[12754]: (root) CMD (/usr/bin/jetcli backup --run snapshots > /dev/null 2>&1)

........

 

Workaround

 

There is a simple workaround this issue and that is to simply remove the comment "# keep 5 last archives" after the rotation count " rotate 5" in this file:

/etc/logrotate.d/libcare

This will stop the error messages. 

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