4.4 Log rotation

Most of daemons like syslog append their events and logs into a file. As a result, the file size will get larger over time. To avoid this, Linux uses logrotate to manage logs. Logrotate is run daily by the cron; it can create and then zip up the files into their respective folders. The main configuration file of logrotate is located at /etc/logrotate.conf. Example 4-13 shows logrotate.conf configuration file in a standard SLES 8 server.

Example 4-13. Sample of logrotate configuration file

 # /etc/logrotate.conf configuration file # rotate log files weekly weekly # keep 4 weeks worth of backlogs rotate 4 # create new (empty) log files after rotating old ones create # uncomment this if you want your log files compressed #compress # uncomment these to switch compression to bzip2 #compresscmd /usr/bin/bzip2 #uncompresscmd /usr/bin/bunzip2 # RPM packages drop log rotation information into this directory include /etc/logrotate.d # no packages own lastlog or wtmp -- we'll rotate them here #/var/log/wtmp { #    monthly #    create 0664 root utmp #    rotate 1 #} # system-specific logs may be also be configured here. 

Any application that you would like logrotate to manage should be created as a file and placed into the directory /etc/logrotate.d/; it will be automatically run by the cron daemon on daily basis, /etc/cron.daily.