Re: /var partition overflow (due to spyware?) in FreeBSD default install

From: Garance A Drosihn (drosih_at_rpi.edu)
Date: 10/24/03

  • Next message: Brett Glass: "Re: /var partition overflow (due to spyware?) in FreeBSD default install" 
    Date: Thu, 23 Oct 2003 20:01:07 -0400
To: Brett Glass <brett@lariat.org>, security@freebsd.org

    At 4:41 PM -0600 10/23/03, Brett Glass wrote:
    >
    >FreeBSD currently comes configured, in the default install,
    >to check /var/messages only once a day, and to rotate the
    >log file if it's above a certain size.

    My /etc/newsyslog.conf indicates that /var/log/messages
    should be rotated whenever it gets over 100K.

    >I've temporarily changed /etc/crontab so that newsyslog is
    >run every 5 minutes instead of once a day (which may be a
    >good idea to prevent other denials of service via this sort
    >of overflow as well).

    On both my 4.x and 5.x systems, /etc/crontab will run
    newsyslog once per hour. I'm pretty sure that at least some
    of the code in newsyslog assumes that the program is run only
    once per hour. Running it more frequently than that may
    cause some problems.

    I'm sure that /var can fill up even if /var/log/messages is
    rotated every hour, if the error messages are coming in fast
    enough. But the file should be getting rotated once per hour
    in the default install, not once per day.

    I do not think that the correct solution is to rotate the
    files at an even faster rate. Just how large is /var on the
    machine where you're seeing this problem? 

    -- 
Garance Alistair Drosehn            =   gad@gilead.netel.rpi.edu
Senior Systems Programmer           or  gad@freebsd.org
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute    or  drosih@rpi.edu
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  • Next message: Brett Glass: "Re: /var partition overflow (due to spyware?) in FreeBSD default install"

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