10 Jan

2008

Logrotate Error on Ubuntu

For a few weeks now, I’ve been seeing this error in my logs every night:

/etc/cron.daily/logrotate:
error: error running shared postrotate script for /var/log/mysql.log /var/log/mysql/mysql.log /var/log/mysql/mysql-slow.log
run-parts: /etc/cron.daily/logrotate exited with return code 1

What’s happening is that after all the mysql backing up and everything is done, ubuntu is trying to use the debian-sys-maint user to flush the logs, this is actually called in /etc/logrotate.d/mysql-server. On my system, we seem to have lost this mysql user.

The solution is to look for the password used in the /etc/mysql/debian.cnf file, mine looks like this:

# Automatically generated for Debian scripts. DO NOT TOUCH!
[client]
host     = localhost
user     = debian-sys-maint
password = xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
socket   = /var/run/mysqld/mysqld.sock
[mysql_upgrade]
user     = debian-sys-maint
password = xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
socket   = /var/run/mysqld/mysqld.sock
basedir  = /usr

Using the password, and some inspiration from this post on the Ubuntu Forums I recreated the user with the necessary permissions and password with:

GRANT RELOAD, SHUTDOWN, PROCESS, SHOW DATABASES, SUPER, LOCK TABLES ON *.* TO 'debian-sys-maint'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY PASSWORD 'xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx'

This did the trick, as the nightly errors have now disappeared from my script. Hope this helps someone in a similar situation – if you can expand these notes then please add a comment and I will update this as needed – thanks :)

28 thoughts on “Logrotate Error on Ubuntu”

Bousteur on January 21, 2008 at 08:12 said:

Works Fine for me !
Thanks a lot for this information.
(My user wasn’t lost. Only its password)

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LornaJane on January 21, 2008 at 08:42 said:

Bousteur: I’m glad this was helpful, thanks for adding the comment about the lost password.

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Sylvain Bolay on April 4, 2008 at 11:53 said:

I did not immediately see that the “PASSWORD” in the mysql query was the one found on the /etc/mysql/debian.cnf file.
Thanks a lot for this trick! It also works fine for me (Debian 2.4.26 with mysql server version: 5.0.32-Debian_7etch5-log)!

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LornaJane on April 4, 2008 at 12:23 said:

Glad it helped – thanks for updating with your platform information :)

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jonathan on November 20, 2009 at 16:11 said:

Thanks for the tip, it works for me, altough you have to remove the word ‘PASSWORD’ from the mysql sentence to make it work.

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Ben on December 20, 2009 at 22:38 said:

Thanks!

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Carl Nobile on August 27, 2010 at 00:16 said:

This issue seems to happen when you move a DB from one machine to another as I did. The procedure you describe above should be put into MySQL documentation. You should put in a bug report to the MySQL people as their documentation needs to updated. And yes the PASSWORD parameter needs to be removed or the password will not get encrypted.

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- Alan A on September 29, 2010 at 15:35 said:
  
  Carl, I also moved a DB from one machine to another and had this problem. Thanks for calling it out.
  LomaJane, thanks for the info.
  
  Reply ↓
  - Martin McClure on July 29, 2012 at 21:08 said:
    
    Thanks for the helpful posts!
    I also ran into this after moving a database from an older Debian server to a newer Ubuntu one. Since I moved *all* databases, including users, this set the password for debian-sys-maint to the one randomly generated on the old system. I fixed this by copying /etc/mysql/debian.cnf from the old system to the new system, so the passwords once again match.
    
    Reply ↓
Carl Michael Giblhauser on March 23, 2011 at 05:43 said:

I had the same issue in 10.04 server. Thanks LornaJane!

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Nicola Grana on June 15, 2011 at 08:30 said:

Thanks for the tip, it works for me. I was moving from Ubuntu 8.04 to Ubuntu 10.04. Furthermore, I think Carl Nobile is right.

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Brian Mauter on November 16, 2011 at 15:06 said:

Thanks for the post. Helped me out. Debian Squeeze.

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Bogdan on January 23, 2012 at 06:51 said:

In case it does not work, try:

update user set password=PASSWORD(“xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx”) where User=’debian-sys-maint’;

In my cases the passwords were hashed.

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Callum on January 28, 2012 at 10:10 said:

Awesome, thanks for that. This error has been bugging me for a few weeks now. I finally got around to searching for it and bingo, problem solved. In my case the user’s password had changed, so I changed it back, and bob’s yer uncle.
UPDATE user SET Password = PASSWORD('passwordFromFile') WHERE User = 'debian-sys-maint' && Host = 'localhost';

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Soulrever on March 12, 2012 at 14:33 said:

Works Fine for me !
Thanks a lot for this information.

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Kim Rostgaard Christensen on April 3, 2012 at 14:40 said:

Thanks for the tip!

I think my debian-sys-maint password was lost because I did a full replication, that included the users database.

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Iain Cuthbertson on May 4, 2012 at 11:32 said:

I had the same problem as Kim when I replaced an old dev server with a new one.
This has saved me from the anoying daily emails.
Thank you for blogging about this.

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Aryo Pinandito on May 24, 2012 at 22:26 said:

Because of the MySQL passwords in my Ubuntu box (12.04 LTS) were hashed, I have to remove the PASSWORD keyword on the SQL statement like the following to make it work:

GRANT RELOAD, SHUTDOWN, PROCESS, SHOW DATABASES, SUPER, LOCK TABLES ON *.* TO ‘debian-sys-maint’@’localhost’ IDENTIFIED BY ‘xxxxxxxxxxxx’;

Thanks!

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- hlcs on August 20, 2016 at 05:51 said:
  
  +1
  
  Reply ↓
shr on July 20, 2012 at 04:11 said:

Thanks a bunch !

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Matthew on August 4, 2012 at 15:33 said:

This worked on the Debian Squeeze x64 server I just deployed, thanks for posting this!

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markitoxs on September 14, 2012 at 08:18 said:

Thanks for this tip!

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Stanimir on December 5, 2012 at 10:21 said:

Thank you! This tip is working on ubuntu 12.04.

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Aran on May 3, 2013 at 12:53 said:

Thanks, this fixed the problem for me. I found that you can also test if the maintenance user has its permissions set correctly with the following so you don’t have to wait for cron to run it to see if the problem’s fixed.
mysqladmin –defaults-file=/etc/mysql/debian.cnf ping

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dimaj on July 15, 2014 at 15:21 said:

Thank you so much for this!

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Henry B on July 16, 2014 at 14:48 said:

Just as a reminder you may have to run FLUSH PRIVILEGES; after the above commands.

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Orhan Cakan on August 21, 2014 at 08:19 said:

an all in one bash one liner would be:

[code]
echo “GRANT RELOAD, SHUTDOWN, PROCESS, SHOW DATABASES, SUPER, LOCK TABLES ON *.* TO ‘debian-sys-maint’@’localhost’ IDENTIFIED BY ‘$(grep -m 1 password /etc/mysql/debian.cnf | cut -d” ” -f3)’; flush privileges;” | mysql -u root
[/code]

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- Rolf on February 6, 2017 at 11:27 said:
  
  Nice! Good support :). I’m here every now and then to update..
  
  Reply ↓

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