mulitlog not getting terminated when Red Hat reboots?

I'm administering some services on Red Hat boxes, and have found
what seems to be an anomoly.

The symptom is that upon a reboot, the multilog-managed logs end
up with a '.u' suffix.

According to multilog(8):

         .u	This  file was being created at the moment of an
		outage. It may have been truncated and has not been
		processed.

I don't know what 'outage' means here.

Our servers run in runlevel 3 (mulituser, no graphical head).

According to halt(8), when we issue the 'reboot' command in run
level 3, this gets translated to the 'shutdown -r' command.  That
manpage claims:

  All processes are first notified that the system is going down
  by the signal SIGTERM.

The manpage for multilog(8) says:

  If multilog receives a TERM signal, it will read and process
  data until the next newline, and then exit, leaving stdin at the
  first byte of data it has not processed.

We're running with local SCSI drives, not NFS or anything.  The
version of the OS is:

  # cat /etc/redhat-release 
  Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS release 4 (Nahant Update 4)

So - twofold question here:

- What is 'outage', in the context of mulitlog?

- How can I arrange for mulitlog to think there _isn't_ an outage
  when we reboot?

Thanks for any advice...

-- 
Brian Reichert				<[email protected]>
55 Crystal Ave. #286			Daytime number: (603) 434-6842
Derry NH 03038-1725 USA			BSD admin/developer at large