Error stat of log failed: Permission denied during LogRotation

Your original error messages make no sense with what you're showing for your cron that runs your logrotate.

rotating pattern: /home/mail3/log/popMailProcessing.log  forced from command line (60 rotations)
empty log files are rotated, old logs are removed
considering log /home//log/popMailProcessing.log
error: stat of /home/mail3/log/popMailProcessing.log failed: Permission denied

What are these paths doing going to /home/mail3/log/*? Also what's missing from the /home//log/popMailProcessing.log line? Seems like you're only showing some of the actual situation in your question.

Debugging the issue

Put this line in a shell script, logrotate.sh:

#!/bin/bash
/usr/sbin/logrotate -f -v /etc/logrotate.d/mail3-logs &>> /var/log/logrotate/rotate.log

Make it executable and run it like this from the cron:

03 00 * * * root strace -s 2000 -o /tmp/strace.log /path/to/logrotate.bash

In going through the output you should see what is getting tripped up by the permissions problems.

EDIT #1

After conversing with the OP he mentioned that the above debugging technique uncovered that SELinux was enabled. He was perplexed as to why this was the case since he had previously disabled it with the command setenforce 0.

Disabling SELinux in this fashion will only remain in this state until the next reboot. The default mode for SELinux is dictated by this file on Fedora/CentOS:

$ cat /etc/sysconfig/selinux
# This file controls the state of SELinux on the system.
# SELINUX= can take one of these three values:
#   enforcing - SELinux security policy is enforced.
#   permissive - SELinux prints warnings instead of enforcing.
#   disabled - SELinux is fully disabled.
SELINUX=disabled
# SELINUXTYPE= type of policy in use. Possible values are:
#   targeted - Only targeted network daemons are protected.
#   strict - Full SELinux protection.
SELINUXTYPE=targeted

To permanently disable SELinux you'll want to change the line SELINUX=.. to one of the 3 states, enforcing, permissive, disabled.

I would encourage you however to take the time to understand why SELinux is disallowing the access to the directory these log files are within, and add the appropriate context's so that SELinux allows this access. SELinux is an important part of the layered security model that is facilitated on Linux distros that make use of it, and blindly disabling it is taking one of the critical layers away.

References

  • 45.2.7. Enable or Disable SELinux - CentOS 5 user's guide
  • 5.4. Enabling and Disabling SELinux - Red Hat 6 user's guide

I think disabling SELinux is not the best option. The better solution, in my opinion, is to create and apply policy. Here is an example of how to do it for other policy http://www.greenvalleyconsulting.org/2015/01/28/installing-coldfusion-11-on-centos-6-6-with-selinux-enforcing/. The same concept will apply to logrotate_t policy instead of httpd_t as outlined in link.

See steps to install policycoreutils-python in the link. then run

grep logrotate /var/log/audit/audit.log | audit2why

audit2allow -a

look for logrotate_t, it more likely will look like this

#============= logrotate_t ============== 
allow logrotate_t file_t:file getattr;

then run

audit2allow -a -M logrotate_t

semodule -i logrotate_t.pp

chcon -R -t logrotate_t /[your log file location]/*.log


In a pinch, you can work around this with:

semanage permissive -a logrotate_t

That's offered in the logrotate_selinux man page.

You'll still be able to see the messages (that you should eventually address) with audit2allow.

Tags:

Logrotate

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