Logs in /var/log which are governed by /etc/logrotate.d/syslog are not rotating as expected.

Solution Verified - Updated -

Environment

  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6

Issue

  • Logs in /var/log which are governed by /etc/logrotate.d/syslog are not rotating as expected.
  • Other logs are rotated correctly.

Resolution

  • Remove the offending file name

Root Cause

missingok option is not configured.
The config file /etc/logrotate.d/syslog contained the following error:


.
#/var/log/spooler
.
.

The debug log showed the following:

error: stat of #/var/log/spooler failed: No such file or directory.

This means that the entire line including the # was taken as a file name and not as a comment.

Diagnostic Steps

  • Collect the output of logrotate in debug mode as below

    #logrotate -d /etc/logrotate.conf > /tmp/logrotate.log 2>&1

  • The debug run showed the following message:

    Nov 27 03:41:01 server logrotate: ALERT exited abnormally with [1]
Nov 28 03:31:01 server logrotate: ALERT exited abnormally with [1]
 ..
Jan  1 03:33:01 server logrotate: ALERT exited abnormally with [1]
Jan  2 03:41:01 server logrotate: ALERT exited abnormally with [1]

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