[syslog-ng]CRITICAL: disk flooding bug - disabling of STATS seems to be broken in 1.5.19

[Dominique Kaiser]

Disabling STATS reporting with options "{ stats(0); }" doesn't work anymore!
Instead syslog-ng gets busy reporting STATS all the time without pause - 
and succeeds in eating up all free disk space in a matter of minutes.
If you don't have an extra mount for /var/log your whole system is rendered
inoperatible...

the upstream Changelog shows an entry from 2002-06-17 concerning STATS which
most likely describes the change causing the bug.

I didn't fully study the sources but on first sight it seems to me that
the error is in main_loop() in src/main.c in the lines 188 and 204. 
I think it should be 
  if (s.timeout > 0)
instead of
  if (s.timeout <= 0)
especially as the callback timers seem to get deleted in line 201. The
way it is now STATS might be disabled by providing any positive config
value??!!  
  
The problem might also be solved if one could use "stats(-1);" to deactivate
STATS reporting but syslog-ng doesn't seem to accept negative values
(which might be another bug on itself?).

In the default installation the default value of 600 seconds is used, so
this
bug is not a problem if syslog-ng is used with unchanged config options.
But whoever does want his/her disks tpo spin down at all will have tried to
disable STATS...

Cheers,
Dominique.

P.S.: also reported as Bug #156045 to the Debian BTS...
P.P.S.: I'm not a member of the syslog-ng mainling list...