--On March 31, 2009 10:09:37 AM +0200 "Giacomo A. Catenazzi" <cate@debian.org> wrote:
Consider also that there are different loggers, different way to implement logs and not a right way to do it, so it is really possible to have non-optimal log-rotation scripts. I don't use postfix, so I did not investigate if there are bugs.
In debian, nothing logs directly to /var/log/mail.log, everything comes in via syslog, so only syslogd ever has the file open for writing. Log rotation is controlled IIRC by savelog hich controls ALL rotation of all logs for syslogd logs, so i there was a bug in that he should be missing chunks from everything.
The (most) likely explanation is running out of disk space in /var, followed by someone (accidentally or not) removing the logs, followed (very distantly) by some new bug in the log rotation scripts. I haven't checked any of my deb5 machines yet, but I've never seen this happen with deb4. Though running out of space in /var would possibly result in missing other logs too. I don't think it was mentioned if the log.N's are sequential or not. Or if he has compression in use on them or not.