Deploying Linux on IBM eServer pSeries Clusters

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 ...