Lion: newsyslog.conf

Question

Lion: newsyslog.conf

Hi Community,

because Microsoft Entourage is flooding my system.log I took a closer look to the log rotate mechanism and figured out that the behavior of the system.log doesn't fit to the settings of the configuration file /etc/newsyslog.conf. It should rotate each night at 00:00 but in /var/log I can see only one file since a few days and it's growing and growing and growing.

/var/log/system.log

640 7

*

@T00 J

The cause of this flooding seams to be a Microsoft bug because plenty of Lion users with Entourage or Outlook, who are connected to an Exchange server have this behavior, so currently I'm not able to fix the cause, so I've to monitor the effects. Is there an explanation of this log rotate behavior? Do I misunderstood the entries in the config file newsyslog.conf?

I took my knowledge of the settings in newsyslog.conf from this site:

http://resin.csoft.net/cgi-bin/man.cgi?sektion=5&topic=newsyslog.conf

Especially from this section:

Some examples: $D0 rotate every night at midnight (same as @T00)

Thanks & Bye Tom

Posted on May 4, 2012 12:41 AM

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Answer 1

May 4, 2012 2:07 AM in response to prontosystems

"Is there an explanation of this log rotate behavior?"

If your computer is sleeping then the log will not rotate. Since you are concerned with the size of the log file then rotate the log by size

/var/log/system.log 640 7 1000 * J

You might consider a size larger than 1000. You dont want to have the log being rotated several times a day.

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Answer 2

May 4, 2012 2:58 AM in response to Mark Jalbert

Hi Mark,

Mark Jalbert wrote:

"Is there an explanation of this log rotate behavior?"

If your computer is sleeping then the log will not rotate. Since you are concerned with the size of the log file then rotate the log by size

okay this would be a plan B. But the newsyslog daemon on my Snow Leopard box works as expected and rotates the system.log each night even though it is also in sleep mode at night. Okay nobody knows exactly what's going on in the system and what are the reasons for some voodoo wake up calls but imho it is noticeable that Snow Leopard rotate the system.log each night and Lion never did it since more than one week. Maybe this isn't a Lion bug but rather a SL bug... ;-)

Thx & Bye Tom

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