On Sun, Aug 06, 2006 at 17:23:13 +0000, Elmer E. Dow wrote:
> On Sunday 06 August 2006 09:43 pm, Andrew Sackville-West wrote:
> > On Sun, Aug 06, 2006 at 02:31:40PM +0000, Elmer E. Dow wrote:
> > > I discovered that /var/log/messages is 428.6 MB on my IBM R40
> > > laptop running Sarge. I see /var/log/messages.1.gz, to
> > > messages.6.gz. None of those are more than 302 KB and they're a
> > > year old. Syslog is in a similar situation. Other log files
> > > aren't so big, but they haven't been rotated in a year either.
> > > Why did rotation stop? How do I start it again? Logrotate was
> > > installed. I just got rid of it. Could it have been
> > > interfering?
> >
> > umm... logrotate rotates the logs. removing it will prevent the
> > logs from being rotated. check man logrotate to get the output
> > from logrotate emailed to you so you can see what it happening.
> > you should confirm that there is still a cron job for log rotate.
> > When I've had problems with logrotate in the past is has been a
> > permissions issue, so maybe you have changed some permissons
> > inadvertantly causing this problem.
> >
> > A
>
> From the reading I've done recently, I was under the impression that
> Debian (unlike RedHat) used syslogd and cron to handle log
> rotation. According to
> http://www.ducea.com/2006/06/06/rotating-linux-log-files/ , log
> rotation is handled in two ways on a Debian system (in contrast to
> RedHat, etc.). Most system log files are rotated by syslog itself
> and not by using logrotate. Logrotate is the default choice for all
> other log files (application logs). Indeed, /etc/logrotate.d
> contains scripts for apps (aptitude, exim4-base, ppp, etc.), while
> # /usr/sbin/syslogd-listfiles --weekly
> /var/log/mail.warn
> /var/log/uucp.log
> /var/log/user.log
> /var/log/daemon.log
> /var/log/messages
> /var/log/debug
> /var/log/auth.log
> /var/log/mail.err
> /var/log/mail.log
> /var/log/kern.log
> /var/log/lpr.log
> /var/log/mail.info
> R40:/home/ellsworth#
>
> Logrotate isn't listed in a cron job since I deleted the logroate
> package, but strangely logrotate.d still exists. I hope that
> reinstalling logrotate will set it up again. You're right, I need
> to put logrotate back for the apps, but it appears that it's
> syslogd's responsibility to rotate system logs. I've seen quite a
> bit online about changing a Debian system to use logrotate for
> system files, but I haven't done that here. Feel free to enlighten
> me if I'm wrong in my understanding of this. What could I have done
> to have messed up what syslogd should be doing? I checked, and
> syslogd has a script file in cron.daily and cron.weekly with
> correct permissions. Now what?
Are you sure that the cronjobs actually run during the night? You could
put a short script into /etc/cron.daily, just "touch /tmp/cron-flag" or
something similar, to rule out problems with your cron setup.
--
Regards,
Florian
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