why is web traffic being written to the rotated log file?

[Alfred Hovdestad]

It sounds like you are using logrotate to rotate your apache logs.  The 
problem is that apache keeps the i-node open when the logrotate tries to 
roll the logfile.  You need to add a graceful restart for apache to roll 
apache over to the new log file.  Let me know if you need the syntax of 
the command to add to your logrotate (you can also check out 
/etc/logrotate.d/httpd).

    Alfred Hovdestad, RHCE
    University of Saskatchewan



Chris W. Parker wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> I've had this problem for a while and have not been able to pinpoint the
> cause or determine a frequency. Every once in a while (read, when I
> notice) I'll see that what SHOULD be the active web log file is not
> being written to and instead the rotated version of the log is being
> written to. It's seems like the log rotating process gets interrupted
> (or something) and doesn't get a chance to finish so syslog gets
> confused and writes to the rotated log file instead of the new log file.
> 
> Take this morning for example. I come into the office, check the
> webalizer stats for the site and see that the graph has only reported a
> small amount of traffic on the 26th and nothing on the 27th or 28th.
> Then I check the logs and see that custom_log is at 0 bytes. But what I
> also notice is that even though custom_log is 0 bytes, syslog is STILL
> writing data to custom_log.1 (all hope is not lost, at least I still
> have my data).
> 
> So I 'service httpd restart' and see that custom_log is now being
> written to and custom_log.1 is no longer being written to.
> 
> Fortunately my web traffic is being written to a log file instead of the
> log file it should be so it's mostly just an annoyance. But how can I
> prevent this or find out what is causing it?
> 
> BTW I'm using FC3.
> 
> 
> Thanks,
> Chris.
>