Huge daily.out doc

Yes, for just one day that is very big! Can you post your daily.out log?

How can I determine when they are scheduled to run? And how long do they run for?

Unless changed, periodic daily and weekly are scheduled to run at 3:15AM, monthly at 5:30AM. FWIW, this is determined by the com.apple.periodic... launch daemons in /System/Library/LaunchDaemons.

The execution should be fairy fast depending on your machine. Mine only takes a few seconds.

That looks like a portion of the full console log, not just the daily.out log. Open the Console. Look down the left for daily.out and select that. It's log will be on the right.

Just looking at a small sampling of the entire console log isn't going to be much help unless you happen to find the section around the time periodic daily ran. Even then it's not clear there will be anything useful.

For future reference, if you really have to supply a large file, one way of doing that would be to compress it, upload it to a media sharing site like www.Rapidshare.com, and post the link to the uploaded file for others to download. Rapidshare will tell you that link when the upload is complete.

As for the scheduled time of when the periodics run, I said in an earlier post, if the machine is sleeping when a launchd item is scheduled to run then it will still be run shortly after you wake your machine. So you can still sleep you machine overnight. The next day, when you wake it up, the scheduled items will run. When they are run is a function of how long your machine was sleeping but that's a fairly short delay and you really don't have to care about that minor detail.

This is definitely not right. It almost looks like the system and kernel logs are being redirected to daily.out. That would certainly explain a humongous daily.out file! At the moment I am at a loss to explain this.

In the display you show, slide the cursor up to the top so I can see the initial part of the daily.out. Or maybe better yet, zip it and stick it on rapidshare (or if you have your own favorite -- mediafire, filesonic, depositfiles, whatever -- I don't care, they all work similarly) so I can download it.

Mary Ries wrote:

Copied the log into Word.

Forget Word; it's a word processor, not a tool for this job. When daily.out is selected, press and hold Cmd and click the string "daily.out" in the title bar. The path will drop down. Select the parent folder "log". Finder will open the folder and select the daily.out file. In Finder select File > Compress "daily.out", and a zipped copy will be created. This is what you should upload. I can't help, as I won't have access to the file, but let's hope someone can.

I agree with X423424X that something is definitely wrong, and logs which have no business there, such as the firewall log, are being redirected to daily.out.

I can't help, as I won't have access to the file, but let's hope someone can.

Why not? Once the download link is known anyone who knows that link can download it. That the whole point of sites like rapidshare (and as I alluded to, there are probably hundreds of them, rapidshare happens to be one of the more "famous" or "infamous" depending on your point of view about them).

By the way, only the uploader can delete the file on the site.

X423424X wrote:

Why not?

Because, at present, I'm working in a country which censors the Internet severely. I'm sure you'll figure out the rest...

Mary,

Can you post the contents of /private/etc/syslog.conf ? Open the Terminal application and copy the following command:

cat /private/etc/syslog.conf

Paste this into the Terminal window and press the return key. Copy the command and the text output and paste it into a post.

I was thinking along the same lines but I didn't want to delve deeper until I saw your daily.out log. The thought behind this is that if your daily.out contains some of the other logs like kernel.log it is either being written to by the associated components, and they get where to write by syslog.conf configuration file, or it is being copied in by one of the periodic daily scripts. The above syslog.conf looks ok. So what's left to look at is the periodic daily scripts.

So the key files involved with periodic daily are the following.

/etc/defaults/periodic.conf this is the config file for period

/user/sbin/periodic this is the periodic script itself

And the directory to look at is:

/private/etc/periodic/daily directory of peioric daily scripts

So it would be nice to see the two scripts, the listing of the files in the daily directory, and the listing of the first script in the daily directory (which I would expect to be 100.clean-logs).

I'm posting this without telling you how to do this because I need to come up with a small set of terminal commands and just consturcting this post is taking long enough. This silly forum software has time limits on how long you can do things and I don't want to loose what I've typed so far. I do it in a separate post.

Update:

I downloaded your daily.out. After looking at that, and before worrying about all the stuff I mentioned above, please post just the listing of the files in /private/etc/periodic/daily and the contents of just first file in that directory.

Below is the top portion of your daily.out so that others who can't do the download can see it. This looks like it's comming from an old script. Not the Snow Leopard version. Titles are slightly different and it's doing the log rotations from here.

Wed Dec 28 07:32:36 PST 2011

Removing old log files:

Removing old temporary files:

Cleaning out old system announcements:

Removing stale files from /var/rwho:

Removing scratch fax files

Disk status:

Filesystem Size Used Avail Capacity Mounted on

/dev/disk0s2 465Gi 114Gi 351Gi 25% /

/dev/disk1s2 931Gi 110Gi 821Gi 12% /Volumes/TimeMachine

/dev/disk2s2 2.0Mi 1.9Mi 40Ki 99% /Volumes/GrandPerspective 1.3.3

Network interface status:

Name Mtu Network Address Ipkts Ierrs Opkts Oerrs Coll

lo0 16384 <Link#1> 383 0 383 0 0

lo0 16384 localhost ::1 383 - 383 - -

lo0 16384 localhost fe80:1::1 383 - 383 - -

lo0 16384 127 localhost 383 - 383 - -

gif0* 1280 <Link#2> 0 0 0 0 0

stf0* 1280 <Link#3> 0 0 0 0 0

en0 1500 <Link#4> c4:2c:03:07:4e:72 90319 0 72147 0 0

en0 1500 macintosh.l fe80:4::c62c:3ff: 90319 - 72147 - -

en0 1500 10/24 10.0.0.2 90319 - 72147 - -

fw0 4078 <Link#5> e8:06:88:ff:fe:f5:fa:6c 0 0 0 0 0

en1 1500 <Link#6> d8:30:62:52:3e:31 0 0 0 0 0

Local system status:

7:32 up 13:45, 2 users, load averages: 0.43 0.93 0.95

Removing scratch and junk files:

Removing scratch fax files

Checking subsystem status:

disks:

Filesystem 1024-blocks Used Available Capacity Mounted on

/dev/disk0s2 488050672 119975248 367819424 25% /

/dev/disk1s2 976426672 115269048 861157624 12% /Volumes/TimeMachine

/dev/disk2s2 2016 1976 40 99% /Volumes/GrandPerspective 1.3.3

Last dump(s) done (Dump '>' file systems):

mail:

postqueue: warning: Mail system is down -- accessing queue directly

Mail queue is empty

network:

Name Mtu Network Address Ipkts Ierrs Opkts Oerrs Coll

lo0 16384 <Link#1> 393 0 393 0 0

lo0 16384 localhost ::1 393 - 393 - -

lo0 16384 localhost fe80:1::1 393 - 393 - -

lo0 16384 127 localhost 393 - 393 - -

gif0* 1280 <Link#2> 0 0 0 0 0

stf0* 1280 <Link#3> 0 0 0 0 0

en0 1500 <Link#4> c4:2c:03:07:4e:72 90319 0 72159 0 0

en0 1500 macintosh.l fe80:4::c62c:3ff: 90319 - 72159 - -

en0 1500 10/24 10.0.0.2 90319 - 72159 - -

fw0 4078 <Link#5> e8:06:88:ff:fe:f5:fa:6c 0 0 0 0 0

en1 1500 <Link#6> d8:30:62:52:3e:31 0 0 0 0 0

ruptime: no hosts in /var/rwho

Rotating log files: system.log

Sat Dec 11 20:57:44 Macintosh loginwindow[33958] <Notice>: USER_PROCESS: 33958 console

Sun Dec 12 19:17:57 Macintosh loginwindow[36867] <Notice>: USER_PROCESS: 36867 console

Sun Dec 12 19:19:06 Macintosh loginwindow[37070] <Notice>: USER_PROCESS: 37070 console

Sun Dec 12 19:36:31 Macintosh loginwindow[37070] <Notice>: DEAD_PROCESS: 37070 console

...<snip>...