Configure log rotations

Reviewer: name contact BSD flavour

Concept

Understand that the system automatically maintains many different logs. Be able to configure log rotation by either time or size.

Introduction

The newsyslog (((newsysylog))) tool is used to backup log files and then create new empty log files. (TODO Footnote: System logging is covered in section Configure system logging.) It can compress log files and remove old log files. By default, the BSD systems run "newsyslog" once every hour via cron. (The cron scheduler is covered in section Configure an action to be scheduled by cron(8).) It can rotate logs (((logs))) when they reach a certain size or at a certain time (within an hour). And it can optionally send a signal to a daemon after moving and creating a new log file.

TODO: explain "rotated" or "rotation"

Note that the newsyslog(8) implementations vary by BSD.

The newsyslog configuration is at /etc/newsyslog.conf.(((/etc/newsyslog.conf))) The following is an example configuration:

""# logfilename [owner:group] mode count size when flags [/pid_file] [sig_num] ""/var/log/cron root:wheel 600 3 100 * Z ""/var/log/lpd-errs 644 7 10 * Z ""/var/log/maillog 640 7 * @T00 Z ""/var/log/messages 644 5 100 * Z ""/var/log/wtmp 644 3 * @01T05 B

TODO: explain the above. Count is the number of generations. TODO: show examples of results (short directory listing)

Examples

The following newsyslog example rotates a log file under a home directory. It rotates the file whenever it gets to at least 500 Kilobytes and keeps the most recent 52 compressed archives. newsyslog creates a new log file owned by root (and doesn't add any log entry to it), and then sends a USR1 signal to the process found in the listed PID file.

""# logfilename [owner:group] mode count size when flags [/pid_file] [sig_num] ""/home/foo/logs/access.log root: 644 52 500 * bz /var/run/httpd.pid USR1

Practice Exercises

More information

newsyslog(8), newsyslog.conf(5), syslog.conf(5)