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linuxlogrotate

How to force (or workaround) logrotate to move old logs to olddir on different physical disk?


I want logrotate to copy and truncate log file and use olddir on different physical disk. According to manual, olddir can't be on different physical disk because default behaviour of logrotate is to only rename original log file, which wouldn't be possible with different physical disk.

Well, but I am using copytruncate directive, which makes a copy of original file and then truncates original file. So there shouldn't be problem with moving newly copied file to different location on different physical disk.

But when I run logrotate, it still complains about logfile and olddir beeing on different devices.

Is there any way around it ? Possibly running some custom postrotate script which would move log files to desired location ?


Solution

  • This is from logrotate man page.

      olddir directory <br>
            Logs  are moved into directory for rotation. **The directory must be on the 
            same physical device as the log file being rotated**, and is assumed to  be 
            relative  to  the  directory holding the log file unless an absolute path 
            name is specified. When this option is used all old versions of  the  log 
            end  up  in  directory.   This  option  may be overridden by the noolddir 
            option.
    

    Existence of olddir on same physical device is limitation.

    One can use below workaround.

    set olddir to directory in same physical disk, and use postrotate script to move contents of olddir to directory on different physical device.

    Example logrotate configuration file:

    /var/log/httpd/*log {
            copytruncate
            olddir /var/log/httpd/olddir
            rotate 5
        missingok
        notifempty
        sharedscripts
        delaycompress
        postrotate
            mv /var/log/httpd/olddir/* /vagrant/httpd/olddir/
            /sbin/service httpd reload > /dev/null 2>/dev/null || true
        endscript
    }