lastlog and syslogd weirdness

[Nelson Garcia]

This morning when I checked my logs I noticed that syslog was getting about
one entry per second saying 'restarting syslogd'.  I started checking my
other logs and noticed that 'lastlog' contained garbage characters.  I did a
'ps -a' and noticed that the 'logrotate' process had been running for a
while, so I killed it and that stopped the 'restarting syslogd' messages.

I deleted the (corrupted?) lastlog and 'touch lastlog' to create a new file.
I logged off and back on and that just logged more garbage in the file.  Any
ideas as to what's going on here?

I have Linux Mandrake 7.1 and have an ipchains firewall with everything
except port 80 closed to incoming traffic.

Thanks,
Nelson Garcia