Peter's Blog 4.8.2004

Emotional

Sometimes I am

Sometimes I am

Sometimes I am

Sometimes I am

Sometimes I am

Munged things so drupal->pyds smileys are consistant. I used a quick hack, replacing drupal format smileys with PyDS shortcut smileys before posting to PyDS.

Drupal has a system of filters for processing things like smiley->img conversion and in this one case of cross posting to PyDS it should not be done when formatting a posting. Fortunately the drupal smiley shortcuts do not have quotes around them so converting them to PyDS shortcuts before running them through the conversion filter sidesteps the problem neatly.

Logrotate failures

Logrotate started failing with this error:

  error: syslog-ng:7 duplicate log entry for /var/log/messages

The cause was subtle. The logrotate.conf file includes all files in the logrotate.d dir. One of the entries in this directory was syslog-ng which did logrotate on /var/log/messages.

One of my Gentoo emerge --updates had created another file called ._000cfg-syslog-ng (or something similar, I've deleted it now) ready for env-update to merge with the current config. However, env-update didn't delete this file, leaving me with two files trying to logrotate /var/log/messages. Logrotate is clever enough to check all entries for duplicates before doing anything. I compared the two files and there are only differences in the cvs headers.

Lessons Learned:

• env-update is flaky
• check for random hidden files scattered about.