[KLUG Members] sysklogd

[Adam Williams]

>A question for the great minds to ponder, Pinky:
>My backup script, running 5 nights a week, produced minimal output and I
>added a line to /etc/logrotate.conf to rotate it once a month, keeping
>two copies as /var/log/backup.
>Later, I changed the simple redirects, timestamped with the date(1)
>command, to use logger to simplify it's use. I added local3 to
>syslog.conf and associated it with /var/log/backup. Thereafter, the file
>rotated (and now compressed) weekly. Changing logrotate.conf had no
>effect.
>Okay, now I I have it. syslogd maintains a fileopen call to all files
>listed in syslog.conf. Once a day, cron(8) runs perl script
>syslogd-listfiles. This program notes that only a file that accepts
>'*.*' facility.priority pairs (that is, all of 'em) gets rotated daily
>with savelog(8) script. Anything else is rotated once weekly (this seems
>to be pretty much written in, without an /etc conf file).

My system doesn't have a savelog script.  What distro is this (Debian)?

>logrotate only touches those files syslog *doesn't* keep: wtmp, utmp,
>XFree86.0.log and various logs in /var/log/subdirs. I thought logrotate
>did the whole rotation itself, guess I was quite wrong. I'm sure Adam
>covered this, I must have just blanked on that 5 minute part of the
>syslog presentation.

Nope, logroate does it here.  To me it sounds like savelog(8) is an
attempt to rotate open files,  something logrotate does, but they solved
the problem without reading the man page.