Mailgraph/pflogsumm and syslog

Discussion in 'HOWTO-Related Questions' started by wsand70, Aug 3, 2006.

  1. wsand70

    wsand70 New Member

    Thanks for the "Postfix Monitoring" howto btw falko! Posting here however goes without having to ask some troubling questions. I installed to a FC3 box and it worked great! However now after about two or three days I have to restart syslog. What happens is I get an email from pflogsumm with no data, I find the logging has died. Once I restart syslog, it all starts up again. Now that is what is confusing to me since we took out that /var/log/maillog path in the syslog.conf. Looking at what is driving it I do a 'lsof /var/log/maillog'
    Code:
    lsof /var/log/maillog
    COMMAND     PID USER   FD   TYPE DEVICE   SIZE    NODE NAME
    mailgraph 15174 root    4r   REG    3,3 277599 3981346 /var/log/maillog
    syslogd   16365 root    3w   REG    3,3 277599 3981346 /var/log/maillog
    Last time this died and I lsof'd it I only saw mailgraph which always appears to be just reading the log.
    So any pointers on what's happening or suggestions as to the workaround?
    Thanks,
    Warren
     
  2. falko

    falko Super Moderator Howtoforge Staff

    Do you find any error messages about syslog dying in your logs? Does it happen on the same time of day each time?
     
  3. wsand70

    wsand70 New Member

    No error messages at all. And yes it does seem to happen at 4am every morning. I guess it seemed to run longer than that, but only because I didn't notice it soon enough.
     
  4. wsand70

    wsand70 New Member

    I got to thinking... Is it possible that the new log rotate is conflicting with this daily syslog restart?
     
  5. falko

    falko Super Moderator Howtoforge Staff

    Please check all cron jobs on your system to see if there's one that runs at 4.00h every morning. Have a look at crontab -l and also at /etc/crontab.
     
  6. wsand70

    wsand70 New Member

    To be precise I guess it is at 4:02h, and here is what runs from cron.daily:
    Code:
    00-logwatch         0anacron          logrotate  rpm                tetex.cron             yum.cron
    00-makewhatis.cron  certwatch         prelink    slocate.cron       tmpwatch
    00webalizer         clean.quarantine  rkunter    squirrelmail.cron  update_phishing_sites
    Another twist: I didn't restart syslog this past weekend and the cronjob emailed reports at 7:00h; Saturday with data, Sunday no data, and Monday with data. Curently nothing is logging to /var/log/maillog and expect no data again. Is something buffering for a later write or am I supposed to see a live logging if I were to tail it? :confused:
     
  7. falko

    falko Super Moderator Howtoforge Staff

    I guess it's either 00-logwatch or logrotate that "interferes" with syslog. Maybe you can change the script(s) to do a syslog restart.
     

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