difference between maillog and maillog.processed and changing log rotation settings

[Garerth_Westwood]

Hi All,

I've got a couple of questions if anyone can help.

1/ What is the difference between maillog and maillog.processed? I want to keep a permanent record of all mail inbound and outbound even if delivery is deferred by the gray listing. I'm not sure which one is the best to keep.

2/ I would like to change the way that the mail logs get log rotated. I am struggling to work out exactly what happens at the moment but I would like to rotate the log out every day regardless of size. I think currently that the maillog.processed is rotated daily if it is over a specific size. Could someone point me in the right direction to make this change?

Thanks in advance,

Gareth

 

[UFHH01]

Hi Garerth_Westwood,

the logrotation is configured with different config - files and depends on your own settings. Depending on your system you will find these configuratoin files on Debian/Ubuntu at: /etc/logrotate.d/

The *.processed - files are the latest files which have been rotated, before they will be renamed again the next time, logrotation will be done, depending on your settings, but as well, this is a personal setting... you can change these settings in the config - files mentioned above. You might consider using a separate folder ( i.e. /var/log/old_logs/NAME_OF_THE_SERVICE/ ), where you could store the rotated logs and set the "olddir" in the config - files ( possible additional line: olddir /var/log/old_logs/NAME_OF_THE_SERVICE ).

Please use the manual pages for logrotation ( "man logrotate" ) or search with Google for examples and possible settings for logrotation - files.

 

[Garerth_Westwood]

Thanks for the reply UFHH01,

My install is on centos and to the best of my knowlage is a stock install. I found the /etc/logrotate.d folder but there is no config for any of the mail services / maillog however after checking through each of the files in /etc/logrotate.d I have found that /var/log/maillog is included in the syslog config file. I have added "daily" to this config and will see if this does what I want.

I already have a cronjob that takes a copy of the file and dumps it in a separate directory although it looks like the olddir option may do that automatically for me straight from logrotate.

I'll do a bit more digging but I think that has answered my question, thanks.