logging.py: mutiple system users writing to same file getting permission errors.

[Vinay Sajip]

On Dec 10, 8:34 pm, evenrik <even... at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Dec 7, 12:46 pm, Vinay Sajip <vinay_sa... at yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
>
>
>
> > On Dec 6, 6:35 pm, evenrik <even... at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > > An a redhat box I have root, apache and other normal users run code
> > > that uses theloggingmodule to write to the same log file.  Since
> > > umasks are set to 2 or 022 this gets permission errors.
>
> > > I have fixed my issue by patching theloggingcode everywhere there is
> > > an open for write with:
> > > try:
> > >     old_umask = os.umask(0)
> > >     # open for write here
> > > finally:
> > >     os.umask(old_umask)
>
> > > Is there a better way to solve this issue?
> > > Are there any security problems with this solution other than the log
> > > file not being protected?
>
> > Multiple processes writing to the same log file may step on each
> > other's toes:loggingcontains thread synchronisation code but no
> > protection against multiple processes accessing the same resource. The
> > best solution would be to log from all processes to a SocketHandler,
> > and then have a socket receiver process write the logs to file. This
> > effectively serialises access to the log file. An example is given in
> > theloggingdocs, see
>
> >http://docs.python.org/lib/network-logging.html
>
> > Of course, you can have the receiver process run under a uid of your
> > choosing which has the appropriate permissions to write to the log
> > file.
>
> > Regards,
>
> > Vinay Sajip
>
> Thank you for the warning about multiple processes.  We decided to try
> creating a DBHandler to write the logs to PostgeSQL.

Okay. In case you're interested - the original distribution of the
logging package (before it became part of Python) is at
http://www.red-dove.com/python_logging.html and some of the test
scripts, which are in the tarball available from that page, contain an
example database handler (in test script log_test14.py).

Best regards,

Vinay Sajip