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Accepted
enedebe
Asked: 2012-04-20 03:30:58 +0800 CST

Where does logrotate save its own log?

  • 772

I have logrotate running in an EC2 AWS machine rotating Apache logs. Once packed, Apache logs are saved into AWS S3 via s3fs. The problem is that I recently noticed that I didn't have logs rotated. In S3 I have old logs from day 48->60 but the 1->47 doesn't appear.

My question is: Where does logrotate save its own log? It's possible that I have some kind of problem with s3fs, but I need to know before I do anything. I tried to find somewhere the logs but I couldn't find it out.

Any idea?

logrotate

6 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    logrotate does not log anything by default. normally it should be in your cron somewhere, for instance:

    $ grep -r -- 'logrotate.conf' /etc/cron*
/etc/cron.daily/logrotate:/usr/sbin/logrotate /etc/logrotate.conf

    You can either run that manually to see what is wrong, or redirect the logrotate output to a file in the above cron to see what happened next day.

    Likely somewhere the config is incorrect and caused the logrotate run to break.

    • 33

  2. The only thing that logrotate records normally is in cat /var/lib/logrotate/status.

    This is taken from https://serverfault.com/a/518134/266525

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  3. Another good place to look is /var/log/messages on CentOS for errors such as this from the cron.daily /etc/cron.daily/logrotate

    logrotate: ALERT exited abnormally with [1]

    You can also run in debug mode manually and check for errors:

    /usr/sbin/logrotate -d /etc/logrotate.conf

    Source: https://access.redhat.com/solutions/32831

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  4. If you're running logrotate from cron and not redirecting the output, the output, if there is any, will go to email for whichever ID is running the cron job. I redirect my output to a log file.

    For example:

    25 3 * * 7 /usr/sbin/logrotate -s /home/user/conf/mwarelogrotate.state 
/home/user/conf/mwarelogrotate.conf >> /home/user/logs/logrotate.log 2>&1
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  5. When logrotate doesn't rotate logs or enters failed state, it's a good idea to run logorate manually in debug mode to see what errors it lists, like this:

    /usr/sbin/logrotate -d /etc/logrotate.d/*

    This command tests rotating the logs for all the services that have files located in /etc/logrotate.d. If it lists errors (such as errors caused by duplicate log entries), you'll know why logrotate has problems.

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  6. Check /etc/logrotate.conf for global config settings that may be affecting tasks configured through /etc/logrotate.d/

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