Syslog not rotating /var/log/messages

[Derek Broughton]

Brian McKee wrote:

> On Tue, Nov 11, 2008 at 6:47 PM, Sam Kuper <sam at samkuper.com> wrote:
>> Dear all,
>> I've just noticed that despite syslog being set to rotate
>> /var/log/messages weekly, my var/log/messages file contains entries
>> over a week old, and moreover there are no var/log/messages.0 or
>> var/log/messages.1.gz, etc. How do I know that syslog is set to
>> rotate /var/log/messages weekly? Well, 'syslogd-listfiles --weekly'
>> returns, among other things, the line, '/var/log/messages'.
>> Is this normal behaviour for Ubuntu?
>> My system: Ubuntu 8.04.1 server LTS on a Pentium 4 with 512MB RAM.
> 
> Nope - not normal behaviour - witness
> -rw-r----- 1 syslog   adm      221520 2008-11-14 11:13 messages
> -rw-r----- 1 syslog   adm      348605 2008-11-12 07:56 messages.0
> -rw-r----- 1 syslog   adm       60766 2008-11-05 10:03 messages.1.gz
> -rw-r----- 1 syslog   adm       46182 2008-10-28 08:41 messages.2.gz
> -rw-r----- 1 syslog   adm       32060 2008-10-21 08:03 messages.3.gz

Two possiblilities come to mind: you don't have logrotate installed (OK, 
I expect you checked that), or the system isn't up all the time - 
especially when logrotate is scheduled to run - and you don't have 
anacron either installed or properly working.
-- 
derek