Hi,

I ran into a similar problem on Ubuntu as well.

In my case, I was tracking the Tomcat localhost log file in syslog-ng but Tomcat creates a new log file everyday by default, and the filename changes (since it includes the date).

Therefore, I periodically created a softlink to the localhost log file where the link had a constant name. The constant name is needed because I obviously cannot keep changing the syslog-ng configuration to match the day's localhost log file name.

I found that the softlink did not work.

Instead I had to create a hardlink.

This is because the softlink's modified date does not change when the underlying file changes. The hardlink's modified date does change since it is pointing to the actual data. We need the modified date to change for the syslog-ng client to pick up new log entries.

In my case, I periodically ran the following command via CRON in the Tomcat logs directory:

sudo ln -f $(ls -t localhost.* | head -1) tomcat_localhost.log

This is to get the latest localhost log file and create the hardlink for it (overwriting the older hardlink that may have been pointing to the previous day's localhost log file).

I ran this every hour just to be safe.


So in your case, I think you would just need to recreate the hardlink as soon as your log file is rotated.


Hope this helps.

Ankit



---- On Sat, 30 Jun 2018 01:13:44 -0700 Donatello D <bluray.vik@gmail.com> wrote ----

syslog-ng is configured to read a symlink pointing to logs generated from my application which rotates the file using log4j2 rollingfile appender. Everything works fine till the rotation happens. after the file get rotated syslog-ng still seems to hold on to the older inode (which is not moved) and doesn't change to follow the new logs. this however does not happen in RHEL where syslog-ng recognizes the file is now rotated and moves to the new file. In both cases the sym link is always configured to point to the latest file. version details and logs from both OSs below.

What am i missing here?

UBUNTU - 
syslog-ng 3.5.6
Installer-Version: 3.5.6
Revision: 3.5.6-2.1 [@416d315] (Ubuntu/16.04)
Compile-Date: Oct 24 2015 03:49:19
Available-Modules: afsocket,afuser,tfgeoip,confgen,csvparser,syslogformat,afamqp,redis,afsql,affile,afsmtp,linux-kmsg-format,dbparser,system-source,cryptofuncs,basicfuncs,json-plugin,afprog,afsocket-tls,afstomp,afsocket-notls,afmongodb
Enable-Debug: off
Enable-GProf: off
Enable-Memtrace: off
Enable-IPv6: on
Enable-Spoof-Source: on
Enable-TCP-Wrapper: on
Enable-Linux-Caps: on
Enable-Pcre: on

symlink is pointing to the file that gets the logs. prior to rotation the process watches correctly for the file (same inodes held by my app and syslog-ng)

lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 56 Jun 29 08:44 node1-access.log -> /x/logs/vik-test_access.log

COMMAND     PID       USER   FD   TYPE DEVICE SIZE/OFF    NODE NAME
java      11032       vikram 53w   REG    8,1     1101 1542626 vik-test_access.log
syslog-ng 21661       root    9r   REG    8,1     1101 1542626 vik-test_access.log


Post rotation, syslog-ng holds on to the older file (now rotated).

COMMAND     PID       USER   FD   TYPE DEVICE SIZE/OFF    NODE NAME
java      11032       vikram  53w   REG    8,1      876 1542631 e/elasticsearch-6.2.3/logs/vik-test_access.log
syslog-ng 21661       root    9r   REG    8,1     1101 1542626 e/elasticsearch-6.2.3/logs/vik-test_access-2018-06-30.log

The same setup works perfectly fine in RHEL (version details below) where syslog-ng follows the new file correctly.

RHEL
syslog-ng 3.3.5
Installer-Version: 3.3.5
Revision: ssh+git://bazsi@git.balabit//var/scm/git/syslog-ng/syslog-ng-ose--mainline--3.3--master#d5d607c05251b38e821efe27bc46ac8db78dd722
Compile-Date: Oct 18 2012 15:17:09
Default-Modules: affile,afprog,afsocket,afuser,basicfuncs,csvparser,dbparser,syslogformat
Available-Modules: afprog,afsocket-tls,dbparser,confgen,convertfuncs,basicfuncs,afsocket,afmongodb,csvparser,affile,dummy,syslogformat,afuser
Enable-Debug: off
Enable-GProf: off
Enable-Memtrace: off
Enable-IPv6: on
Enable-Spoof-Source: off
Enable-TCP-Wrapper: on
Enable-Linux-Caps: off
Enable-Pcre: on

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