[CentOS] Re: empty /var/log/messages

Dan Trainor dan.trainor at gmail.com
Wed Jun 27 04:21:11 UTC 2007


Shawn Everett wrote:
> On Tuesday 26 June 2007, beast wrote:
>> On 26/06/07 13:42 +0100, Seán O Sullivan wrote:
>>>>> I have one centos 4.0 server which /var/log/messages was always
>>>>> empty (0 bytes). I wonder what has been blocking the syslog to write
>>>>> the log.
>>>> Firstly, I'd suggest updating to 4.5.
>> This is the production machine and has been runing for years, so
>> upgrading OS is not not my first option :)
>>
>>>> Secondly, is /tmp mounted with noexec option?
>> No afaik.
>>
>> root# mount | grep var
>> /dev/hda4 on /var type ext3 (rw)
>>
>>> forgot to add, check /var/log/messages.* for current syslog messages
>> root# ls -l messages*
>> -rw-------  1 root root        0 Jun 25 11:11 messages
>> -rw-------  1 root root 32480831 Jun  3 00:04 messages.1.gz
>> -rw-------  1 root root 81601061 May 27 00:13 messages.2.gz
>> -rw-------  1 root root   905460 May 20 00:01 messages.3.gz
>> -rw-------  1 root root  1055604 May 13 00:01 messages.4.gz
>>
>> Note: previous messages.gz was having gigantic size because recent bug
>> in spamassassin, it logs all spampd log thats why I disable it on the
>> syslog.conf. But after few days I notice that messages were always
>> empty, even I restart syslog and then mv and touch messages
>>
> 
> Is it possible you broke your syslog.conf file?  You could always try 
> reinstalling the file from the RPM.
> 
> Shawn

Hi -

Actually - I've seen this maybe 5 times in 100 systems that I've ran, 
all of the 4.x releases and all exhibited the same problems.  Syslog 
would just stop logging - period.  I've often wondered what had caused 
it, but never really investigated it due to lack of information.

Just wanted to chime in there and let you know that this problem has 
been seen before.

Thanks
-dant



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