Logrotate is failing

[Miguel Silva Rentes]

Hi everyone!

I'm unable to successfully use logrotate to rotate syslog.log files. The problem is that logrotate is always creating a syslog.log.1 file and won't continue to create successive syslog.log.2, syslog.log.3, ..., syslog.log.N files, and it's not compressing these files either. Here's my /opt/logrotate/etc/logrotate.conf file:

create
compress
rotate 10

# uncomment this if you want your log files compressed
# compress

# packages drop log rotation information into this directory
# include /opt/logrotate/etc

# no packages own wtmp -- we'll rotate them here
/var/adm/wtmp {
monthly
create 0664 adm adm
rotate 1
}

# cat syslog
/var/adm/syslog/syslog.log {
rotate 10
daily
create
ifempty
noolddir
compress
create 640 root root
postrotate
/bin/kill -HUP `cat /var/run/syslog.pid`
endscript
}

# cat maillog
/var/adm/syslog/mail.log {
rotate 5
weekly
compress
}

And in /var/spool/cron/crontabs/root I have this configuration:

00 9 * * * /opt/logrotate/bin/logrotate /opt/logrotate/etc/logrotate.conf

If I run logrotate with -v I get the following output:

reading config file /opt/logrotate/etc/logrotate.conf
reading config info for /var/adm/wtmp
reading config info for /var/adm/syslog/syslog.log
reading config info for /var/adm/syslog/mail.log
Handling 3 logs
rotating pattern: /var/adm/wtmp monthly (1 rotations)
empty log files are rotated old logs are removed
errors will be mailed to miguel.rentes@efacec.pt
rotating pattern: /var/adm/syslog/syslog.log after 1 days (10 rotations)
empty log files are rotated old logs are removed
errors will be mailed to miguel.rentes@efacec.pt
rotating pattern: /var/adm/syslog/mail.log weekly (5 rotations)
empty log files are rotated old logs are removed

From here I can see that logrotate is removing my old logs, but I can't seem to understand why because I'm telling it to rotate 10 files in logrotate.conf.

Do you have any suggestions why this is happening? I also want to compress all log files but this is not happening either (gzip is in /usr/contrib/bin which is on the PATH).

Best regards and thanks in advance,

Miguel Rentes

[Dennis Handly]

>gzip is in /usr/contrib/bin which is on the PATH.

This isn't in the default path for cronjobs.
How do you tell logrotate that you want to use gzip and where it is?

[Miguel Silva Rentes]

Hi Dennis!

From the man page I can read:

compress
Old versions of log files are compressed with gzip. See also nocompress.

I didn't know I have to include any option to tell logrotate where to find gzip, I assumed it would find it from the PATH. The verbose output is not explicit either on this matter. So, how can I tell logrotate to use gzip? Isn't gzip used by default? And what about logrotate not rotating 10 times syslog.log?

Best regards,

Miguel Rentes

[Dennis Handly]

>I assumed it would find it from the PATH.

It can't if you are using cron and don't explicitly set it.
Have you tried executing the command from your shell:
/opt/logrotate/bin/logrotate /opt/logrotate/etc/logrotate.conf

[Miguel Silva Rentes]

Hi Dennis!

But how can I configure logrotate to use gzip then? If I run:

/opt/logrotate/bin/logrotate /opt/logrotate/etc/logrotate.conf

I get no output. If I run

/opt/logrotate/bin/logrotate -v /opt/logrotate/etc/logrotate.conf

I get the following output:

reading config file /opt/logrotate/etc/logrotate.conf
reading config info for /var/adm/wtmp
reading config info for /var/adm/syslog/syslog.log
reading config info for /var/adm/syslog/mail.log
Handling 3 logs
rotating pattern: /var/adm/wtmp monthly (1 rotations)
empty log files are rotated old logs are removed
errors will be mailed to miguel.rentes@efacec.pt
rotating pattern: /var/adm/syslog/syslog.log after 1 days (10 rotations)
empty log files are rotated old logs are removed
errors will be mailed to miguel.rentes@efacec.pt
rotating pattern: /var/adm/syslog/mail.log weekly (5 rotations)
empty log files are rotated old logs are removed

Best regards,

Miguel Rentes

[Dennis Handly]

>I get no output.

But did it do what it was suppose to do to the logfiles?

[Miguel Silva Rentes]

Nope.

This is what I have in /var/adm/syslog:

ls -al
total 18208
dr-xr-xr-x 2 bin bin 8192 Jul 13 09:00 .
drwxr-xr-x 15 adm adm 8192 Jul 5 16:31 ..
-rw-r----- 1 root root 85707 Jul 5 08:45 OLDsyslog.log
-r--r--r-- 1 root root 7271 Jul 13 11:03 mail.log
-r--r--r-- 1 root root 118835 Jul 13 08:32 mail.log.1
-rw-r----- 1 root root 82 Jul 13 10:14 syslog.log
-rw-r----- 1 root root 39 Jul 12 09:00 syslog.log.1
-rw-r----- 1 root root 9057037 Jul 7 14:44 xferlog

In this folder there should be compressed files and 3 syslog.log files because I started using logrotate last Friday and I'm telling logrotate to rotate in daily basis. What can be wrong?

Best regards,

Miguel Rentes

[Miguel Silva Rentes]

Hi Dennis,

I've checked my e-mail ang received this message:

"
Subject: errors rotating logs
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit

sh: gzip: not found.
errors occured while rotating /var/adm/syslog/syslog.log

failed to compress log /var/adm/syslog/syslog.log.1
"

This points out that cron doesn't know where gzip is (which is in /usr/contrib/bin). I've changed my crontab to include this line at the top of /var/spool/cron/crontabs/root:

"PATH=/sbin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/usr/contrib/bin:/usr/local/bin"

but when I stopped and started cron I got in my mail this message:

"
Your crontab file has an error in it.
PATH=/sbin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/usr/contrib/bin:/usr/local/bin
unexpected symbol found
This entry has been ignored.

"

So, can anyone tell me how to configure cron to have the path to gzip in PATH?

Best regards,

Miguel Rentes

[Dennis Handly · Accepted solution]

>sh: gzip: not found.

I'm glad that failed as expected. :-)

>I've changed my crontab to include this line at the top of /var/spool/cron/crontabs/root:
>how to configure cron to have the path to gzip in PATH?

Ack!
You change your command part of the entry:
(All one long line.)
00 9 * * * PATH=/sbin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/usr/contrib/bin:/usr/local/bin /opt/logrotate/bin/logrotate /opt/logrotate/etc/logrotate.conf

[Steven E. Protter]

Shalom,

cron for Linux has a default PATH

Not so in HP-UX

Two choices:
1) set the PATH statement, preferably very early in your script.
2) Use full path for commands.

The second method is a problem if OS updates relocate the binaries and you don't wish to spend a lot of time porting your scripts.

SEP