[syslog-ng] syslog-ng 1.1.7 released

[Richi Plana]

On Tue, 13 Apr 1999, Scott Dellinger wrote:

|o| overlapping features -- but log rotation is definitely a logical extension
|o| of handling system logs.  From a configuration standpoint, it is much
|o| cleaner to take care of everything regarding one log in one step. The
|o| problem, however, is that there are a number of different ways that a site
|o| might want to rotate its logs.  Probably the most common way is what was
|o| contained in the proposed syntax above: filename.1, filename.2, etc.  At

One problem Un*x systems administrator haven't totally agreed on is how to
rotate the logs if there was no way to reset the daemon which had opened
the log (and kept it open). The problem has to do with filehandles. Some
programs open a log and keep it open instead of closing and reopening them
when the need arises. Some admins say log rotators should just cp the log
to a backup and do the equivalent of a 'cat /dev/null > logfile'. (which
may cause some problems in some situations).

Personally, I believe there to be three solutions to log rotation: 1) If
the program doesn't support log rotation, kill the daemon, rotate the logs
and restart the program; 2) if the program only supports SIGHUP to re-read
the configs and close and reopen the logs, just cp the file and SIGHUP it;
and, 3) (the best solution) if the program supports a way to close, mv and
reopen a new log file, then all your problems are solved. If you don't
like the name the program used for the backup, just mv it.



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