rsyslog Unsafe symlinks encountered in /var/log, refusing
When updating packages on an Ubuntu server, I got the error “Unsafe symlinks encountered in /var/log, refusing.”.
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root@ip-172-31-45-33:/var# apt upgrade -y Reading package lists... Done Building dependency tree Reading state information... Done Calculating upgrade... Done 0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded. 1 not fully installed or removed. After this operation, 0 B of additional disk space will be used. Setting up rsyslog (8.32.0-1ubuntu4.2) ... The user `syslog' is already a member of `adm'. Unsafe symlinks encountered in /var/log, refusing. dpkg: error processing package rsyslog (--configure): installed rsyslog package post-installation script subprocess returned error exit status 1 Errors were encountered while processing: rsyslog E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1) root@ip-172-31-45-33:/var# |
This is due to wrong file ownership for /var/log folder.
I found the directory “/var” was owned by user www-data
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root@ip-172-31-45-33:/var# ls -l / | grep var drwxr-xr-x 15 www-data www-data 4096 Sep 1 2021 var root@ip-172-31-45-33:/var# |
To fix the error I changed ownership of /var directory to root user.
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chown root:root /var |
IMPORTANT: Do not use chown -R as the /var folder contains files owned by different users, if you change all file/folder ownership to root, it will mess up the system. For example /var/log/mysql need to be owned by user “mysql”, if you change it to the user “root”, MySQL will fail to start.
You may also need to check ownership of folder /var/log and files inside. You can compare it with another Ubuntu server to make sure directory/file ownerships are correct.
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