Re: Logrotate Newbie Question

[Alan Mead <adm ipat com>]

At 08:29 PM 9/8/99 +0200, you wrote:
>I have been running RH 5.2 for about 3 months now. 
>Being careful and responsible net-phile, (however whose enthusiasm
>shadows actual skills), I go thru my logfiles every day. However,
>I have found that my logfiles grow unconfortably large, and therefore I
>suspect logrotate-config is not set up properly. As stated, I have RH 5.2
>CD installed with most options at default, and am really lost as how to make 
>logs rotate and make it easier to follow my machines whereabouts.

On RH systems there is a very simple logrotate config script (which someone
posted) and then each package drops a config file into /etc/logrotate.d.
Proper (stock) behavior would be each Sunday morning a little after 4AM the
logs were shuffled so that the oldest ones (.4?) are discarded and the
current logs are named .1 and the actual log files are truncated.   So in
/var/log you should see messages and messages.1 to messages.4.

If none of your logs are rotating, then I think logrotate isn't working (at
all).  If so, rather than reconfiguring, you need to make it work.  I
*think* you would be safe removing and reinstalling the package (I think it
will leave the individual files in /etc/logrotate.d alone...   But you can
always make a backup of these before proceeding; you don't want to lose
them because they are parts of other packages, not logrotate).  

I suspect that the file /etc/logrotate.conf or the file
/etc.cron.daily/logrotate has become damaged or deceased.

I had a RH 4.2 system just stop rotating.  I never bothered to fix it
however so I don't know why.

-Alan
---
Alan D. Mead  /  Research Scientist  /  adm ipat com
Institute for Personality and Ability Testing
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