Following up with an addendum: David Guntner grabbed a keyboard and wrote: > > Now, on my main desktop, I keep two windows always open, one running top > and the other tailing the syslog. Top was showing a load in excess of > 5.00 (which I think is a bit excessive...) and was gradually going down. > The only thing of possible note that I could see in they syslog was > that dbus (I don't remember seeing those messages in squeeze, so I'm > guessing this is new and I'm wondering if it's something I actually > need, but that's a different story :-) ) had just activated a service > called org.freedesktop.PackageKit using service helper, and about 20 > seconds after that was two messages saying that rsyslogd had been HUPed > (this is not during the time when logrotate runs, so I'm pretty sure it > wasn't logrotate that HUPed it).
I just discovered that the upgrade "thoughtfully" added anacron back to my system (I removed it from squeeze because my system is used as a server, thus is up 24/7, thus doesn't need anacron). I note that anacron is a "suggests" in the entry for cron (aptitude show cron), so I'm guessing that apt/aptitude now installs things which are simply suggested? If that's so, is there a way to turn that off? It looks like logrotate did in fact run, thanks to the anacron, which looks like it uses the default values you'd get in /etc/crontab for the times to run things within its own configuration. Checking the syslog files confirms that a logrotate did take place at the time the HUPed message shows up in the log. Man, I hope that doing log rotation is not what's causing the system to hang so severely while it's running.... I'll continue to monitor the situation, and if I get anything new, I'll post here. --Dave
smime.p7s
Description: S/MIME Cryptographic Signature