Raskas’ blog

Today I stumpled upon a syslog-ng bug.

We are using syslog-ng-2.1.3 on one of our machines which sends part of his messages over UDP to 2 syslog machines. On some days we noticed that syslog-ng and some other services are stopped. Restarting syslog-ng showed us that they were killed by the OOM-killer.
I directly suspected the java process that was also running on that machine.

After googling around I found this syslog-ng bug: https://bugzilla.balabit.com/show_bug.cgi?id=39

And indeed, we had the same problem. This is how I could reproduce it:

• Stop the syslog service (on the host which receives the messages)
• Restart syslog-ng
• Watch the memory usage of syslog-ng growing until it starts swapping and triggers the OOM-killer

Luckily this bug is already solved, and by upgrading to syslog-ng-2.1.4 the problem is fixed.

CentOS doesn’t provide the rpm packages of syslog-ng, silfreed.net does: http://www.silfreed.net/download/repo/

In a previous post I wrote about output redirection of STDOUT, STDERR and both to a file. Off course you can do the same to append to an existing file:

ls >> output.txt
ls 2>> error.txt

If you try this with &>> you will receive a bash syntax error:

ls &>> output_and_error.txt
bash: syntax error near unexpected token `>'


How come appending of both STDOUT and STDERR to a file does not work this way? Is this a bug in bash?
Yes, I know I can use the following, but I prefer the &>>:
ls 1>> output_and_error.txt 2>&1


And how come I can’t find a bugzilla for bash?
Yes, I know I can use the command bashbug to send a mail to a mailinglist, but this is not the same as bugzilla.