I have a mac server. I have been having problems with my logs. My hard disk became full, when i researched into why it was full it was due to massive log files. There was barley any log rotation policies in place on the server. I tired to use logrotate. This doesn't work on my server. It is a MAC server and doesn't seems to have logrotate. However some of the log files on the server had been being rotated. I looked into why. I found a file that by default is run at 4:30 every Saturday. it is /etc/weekly. I opened the file and found some script that was doing the logrotate on the files that had been being rotated. The script looked like this.
Cool I had found the script that did the log rotations. Bravely i decided to edit that script. I edited it. I ensured the following.
1. I could add my own log files to the for loop
2. Since the log files i was adding would have different permissions i would need to return octal file permissions, the user group and user of that log file. so i could use it in the touch, chmod and chown command
3. I wanted it to only rotate logs if the size of the log file was over 2MB. Otherwise not to bother.
So i designed my script to abide by those rules.
Here is my script
So i wrote this script telling myself how clever i was. Until Saturday when the script run. There were only two log files over 2M. asl.log and weekly_out.log. They were both huges. the script had backed up the old logs gzipped the backups and created new logs with the correct permissions. But the new logs are 0 bytes and are not being written to. What have a done wrong. Is it something to do with not killing the process as is done in the bottom line of the script with syslog.pid. The bottom line is tired to improve the logs policies but have made the situation alot worse. Can anyone offer any advice?
Last edited by timgolding; 04-07-2009 at 06:11 AM..
Without any more information on the services that write to those logs I'll take a wild guess and say that these still have an open handle on the files you're rotating. Usually there's a mechanism like in the second-to-last line, sending a signal (usually SIGHUP or SIGUSR1) to the process, telling it to re-read the configuration and/or recreating the log files.
If there's no such thing, you'll probably have to restart the daemon.
How can i find out which process has a handle open to that log file? If i can find out which deamon uses which log I can at least research into what the mechanism might be for each one?
These look like something generated by cron or similar:
daily_out.log
monthly.out
weekly.out
This is used by the login management system and should never be rotated or otherwise modified manually:
lastlog
Probably used by the UI and/or for support issues:
windowserver.log
SerialNumberSupport.log
crashreporter.log
Probably generated by a script:
rsync_backup.log
No clue:
asl.log
servermgrd.log
ppp.log
secure.log
Quote:
Originally Posted by timgolding
[...]
How can i find out which process has a handle open to that log file? If i can find out which deamon uses which log I can at least research into what the mechanism might be for each one?
Just look through the config files for the daemons you're using to check what files they're writing to. And the mechanism needed is usually noted in the man page (or other shipped documentation). If there's no explicit information about signal involved, better play it save and just restart the daemon.
Last edited by pludi; 04-14-2009 at 10:02 AM..
Reason: Better readability
Hi,
I have below script in logrotate.d to rotate logs.
logs are not rotating after the file grow to 1k, do you have any idea? Is it because of it just only 1K?
Please let me know if the below syntax is in correct.
# more trotate
/sourcepath/*/servers/*/logs/*log... (2 Replies)
Hi Experts,
I have script on crontab and give output quite large. I would like to know how to create rotate log when the size of log maximum 50MB
if the test.log is 50MB then create test.0
Thanks
Edy (2 Replies)
Hi all,
Am trying to write my own log rotate script. Curremtly, what I have is as below:
#!/bin/ksh
file_to_rotate=${1}
x=${2}
while ]
do
let curr=${x}
let prev=${x}-1
if ] ; then
#echo "cp -p ${file_to_rotate} ${file_to_rotate}.${curr}"
cp -p... (7 Replies)
Hi,
Am trying to write my own version of a log rotate scripts 'coz I don't have the logrotate for other flavors of *nix servers. Probably should try and download the source and re-compile but our SA don't want to do so.
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quick question:
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I have a big log,separated by the character:,
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Hello,
I only know the basic for shell programing. I need help for this, I thinks this is a basic for anyone who know a litle of shell scripting.
I need creat a script for a rotatate logs, when a filesystem is full. I have a filesystem.
The rotate consist in zip the current log (copy) and... (1 Reply)
Hi
Can you suggest some perl script. My OS is HP-UX 11.11 I want to it into a cron job.
Every night it will backup the file with that day's date and open a dummy file.
Thanks
Ash (3 Replies)