Folks who don't use FreeBSD can ignore this message.
I recently closed a race condition in newsyslog(8) that could affect
Exim administrators who use the utility to rotate Exim log files _and_
use exim -bS or exim -bs to inject large volumes of mail.
The description of the committed fix is:
| Close a very small window during which new (empty) instances of
| rotated log files are owned by the caller of newsyslog (usually
| root:wheel) even if alternative ownerships were specified in
| newsyslog.conf. | | Note that this is part of a wider problem which is fully addressed
| in OpenBSD. Anyone with the time and inclination to incorporate the
| full fix for the wider problem will receive no complaints from me and
| should feel free to walk all over this delta.
This would manifest as a failed -bS or -bs input run if the log files
were rotated during the input run.
FreeBSD 4.5-STABLE users will pick up the fix in rev 1.25.2.7 of
newsyslog.c, which will be included in the upcoming FreeBSD 4.6-RELEASE.
OpenBSD closed the window ages ago. I believe that NetBSD still has the
problem, but only spent about 3 minutes looking at their code.