Log rotation with Logrotate

[Marc Haber]

Hi,

let me come back to a very old issue regarding log rotation of Nagios.

On Wed, Oct 31, 2007 at 03:10:36PM +0100, Andreas Ericsson wrote:
> Marc Haber wrote:
> >Packaging Nagios for Debian means doing things in a way that users
> >might expect them to be done to avoid confusion.
> 
> Nagios users' confusion, or Debian users' confusion?

Debian users' confusion. Nagios folks will probably compile their own
Nagios anyway.

> Apart from that, you'll have to make sure that the nagios.cfg file
> is kept in sync with the logrotate config somehow, since the cgi's
> do some clever things that requires them to know when the logs are
> rotated. AFAIK, logrotate can't make logfiles with the names expected
> by the CGI's, so unless you have another gui to use with Nagios, I'd
> really recommend you either patch the cgi's (extensively) or don't
> fiddle with it.

Nagios' log files are kind of unique in a way. Usually, log files are
written to and then never touched again. So, basically, the local
admin is free to do like he sees fit with them once they were written.

Slowly realizing that Nagios' "log" files are - of course - processed
by the CGIs for the history functions, I begin to question myself
whether /var/log is the right place for the log files and that they
should probably really be in /var/lib as they are "variable state
information".

> >One of these expected
> >things is that logs are rotated using logrotate, which allows people
> >to specify, for example, how many log generations are to be held.
> 
> Historical monitoring data can be of great value and should, basically,
> never be rotated out.

I agree that the defaults for removing the files should be quite high,
but since disk space is finite there should be an easy option to
remove old files automatically after configuration.

> All in all, it's probably not worth bothering with, as you'll break
> more things than you'll fix.

Given the special role of Nagios log files, agreed.

Greetings
Marc

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