proftpd

proftpd stops running – once a week when logrotate.d runs

On Sunday mornings at 6:30AM I receive this log entry at the bottom of my /var/log/proftpd/proftpd.log file  and proftpd stops running

2015-07-05 06:28:24,870 servera proftpd[31258] 127.0.1.1: ProFTPD killed (signal 15)
2015-07-05 06:28:24,871 servera proftpd[31258] 127.0.1.1: ProFTPD 1.3.5rc3 standalone mode SHUTDOWN

The time (about 6:30AM) on sunday leads me to know from experience that is when the log files rotate if they are set to rotate weekly using logrotate.
So I go in search of the logrotate commands for proftpd with grep and find the following file

#grep proftpd -l /etc/logrotate.d/*
/etc/logrotate.d/proftpd-basic

Inside of /etc/logrotate.d/proftpd-basic file,   there is a command which restarts proftpd after the logs files are rotated

 postrotate
 # reload could be not sufficient for all logs, a restart is safer
 invoke-rc.d proftpd restart 2>/dev/null >/dev/null || true

When I run this at the CLI,  I find that every other time I run the command,  proftpd does not start!   This seems to me to be a timing issue,  so I simply but a sleep command between the stop and start commands in the restart script

/etc/init.d/proftpd
 force-reload|restart)
 if [ "x$RUN" = "xyes" ] ; then
 signal stop 1
 sleep 1 #ADDED BY Michael Blood to avoid a timing issue that would not allow the start if the stop did not complete.
 start

This appears to fix the problem perfectly.