Questions[rotation](server)

I have inherited a tape backup scheme that currently doesn't wash any tapes. Expensive, but fine. We currently run Fulls every quarter, which become our offsite. We then run incrementals in the interim. The fulls are permanently archived offsite.

I would like to switch to a more traditional scheme to save tapes.

However, I can't account for recovering data indefinitely that is deleted by a user (or becomes corrupt) between the full backups. e.g. I have a large ESRI data set of 400 files. A full backup is made on Jan 1. User processes the dataset for several weeks then at some point archives it to network storage. Unbeknownst to the user, one of the files in the dataset becomes corrupted, rendering the entire dataset unusable.

Is there any washable backup scheme that could recover from this type of lost file indefinitely, or is my issue that I need to define a time frame within which I can provide recovery?

Just curious if anyone else has dealt with or considered this scenario?

I've got an Ubuntu (9.04/Jaunty) server VPS that's not properly rotating syslogs.

Here's what I've checked so far:

• syslogd-listfiles lists the files I think should be rotated
• cron.daily is running (so sayeth syslog)
• when I manually run the file checks at the beginning of /etc/cron.daily/sysklogd they all pass (test -x /usr/sbin/syslogd-listfiles, test -x /sbin/syslogd, test -f /usr/share/sysklogd/dummy)
• when I run the cron.daily job manually as root (sudo run-parts --verbose /etc/cron.daily) the logs rotate as I would expect

Anybody have any ideas what I might try next or what I might be missing? I was thinking that perhaps the fact that sysklogd seems to be running it's process as syslog (the owner of the syslogd per ps -C syslogd -o user= | head -n 1) means that there's some sort of permissions issue, and that seems to be supported by the results of running sudo -u syslog run-parts --verbose /etc/cron.daily which ends up with a bunch of permissions erros, but I'm not sure what the best way to resolve that would be.

Contents of my sysklogd file follow, in case that's of assistance. The touch /etc/crontouchtest bit is something I inserted to verify when the file is run successfully. It updates the last used time (ls -lut /etc/crontouchtest) when I execute the run-parts as root, but not when the cron.daily runs.

#! /bin/sh

# sysklogd      Cron script to rotate system log files daily.
#
#               If you want to rotate other logfiles daily, edit
#               this script.  An easy way is to add files manually,
#               to add -a (for all log files) to syslogd-listfiles and
#               add some grep stuff, or use the -s pattern argument to
#               specify files that must not be listed.
#
#               This is a configration file.  You are invited to edit
#               it and maintain it on your own.  You'll have to do
#               that if you don't like the default policy
#               wrt. rotating logfiles (i.e. with large logfiles
#               weekly and daily rotation may interfere).  If you edit
#               this file and don't let dpkg upgrade it, you have full
#               control over it.  Please read the manpage to
#               syslogd-listfiles.
#
#               Written by Martin Schulze <[email protected]>.
#               $Id: cron.daily,v 1.14 2007-05-28 16:33:34 joey Exp $

test -x /usr/sbin/syslogd-listfiles || exit 0
test -x /sbin/syslogd || exit 0
test -f /usr/share/sysklogd/dummy || exit 0

touch /etc/crontouchtest
USER=$(ps -C syslogd -o user= | head -n 1)
[ -z "${USER}" ] && USER="root" || true

set -e

cd /var/log

logs=$(syslogd-listfiles)

test -n "$logs" || exit 0

for LOG in $logs
do
   if [ -s $LOG ]; then
      savelog -g adm -m 640 -u ${USER} -c 7 $LOG >/dev/null
   fi
done

# Restart syslogd
#
/etc/init.d/sysklogd reload-or-restart > /dev/null

EDIT

Outputs as requested:

ls -la /etc/cron.daily (run as root)

drwxr-xr-x   2 root root 4096 Oct 23 07:13 .
drwxr-xr-x 107 root root 4096 Oct 23 07:14 ..
-rwxr-xr-x   1 root root  314 Feb 10  2009 aptitude
-rwxr-xr-x   1 root root  111 May 11 11:49 backup-manager
-rwxr-xr-x   1 root root   89 Jan 26  2009 logrotate
-rwxr-xr-x   1 root root 1334 Oct 22 09:35 sysklogd


ps -ef | egrep '[c]ron' (run as root)

root     13369     1  0 Oct21 ?        00:00:02 /usr/sbin/cron

EDIT 2

Respective paths

from echo $PATH (after swithcing to root):

/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/games

from /etc/crontab:

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

We have some students who have figured out how to rotate the screen using either the hotkey combination or right click context menu. It's easy to fix but it's time consuming because no matter how many times I tell people how to fix it there's always someone that will come up to me.

Now I need two things. First, is there a way to disable screen rotation? Second, I need a script to reset the screen rotation to normal on logon and logoff.

The solutions need to be able to be deployed from a Win2003 server to WinXP clients. I have way too many computers to go through by hand to uncheck enable hot keys on the intel control panel.

Some of my servers collect a lot of packet data. Is there a utility (or patch to tcpdump(1)) to log a pcap stream to disk which:

1. Rotates based on size of data written
2. Prunes written files, keeping only the N most recent
3. Does not re-use output filenames
4. Is self-contained
   (Ruling out, e.g., a rotation with external pruning via crond(8)+tmpwatch(8))

Basically I want a multilog or svlogd that groks the pcap record format.

The -W filecount option of tcpdump-4.0.0 "prunes" by recycling old filenames, which violates #3 above, forcing me to consult mtimes to determine recency and providing no guarantees against surprise truncation of the log file.

The -G option introduces strftime(2)-specifier support in output filenames, which would give me at least second-precision in file names, but I can't figure out how to get pruning to work with this scheme.