Solved: /var/adm/messages and auth.log file not rotating in Linux.

Today we will see an interesting issue where the logs are collected in /var/adm/messages as per rsyslog.conf.

However the log file size in increasing infinitely and is not rotating.

It caused issue with disk space on /var filesystem.

First lets check out rsyslog.conf file settings:

# cat /etc/rsyslog.conf
# ### end of the forwarding rule ###
auth.info /var/adm/auth.log
#*.crit added by /SE/vcontrol/scripts/standardise_logging_V10.sh at Thu Aug 23 11:39:30 BST 2018
*.crit /var/adm/messages
#daemon.warning added by /SE/vcontrol/scripts/standardise_logging_V10.sh at Thu Aug 23 11:39:30 BST 2018
daemon.warning /var/adm/messages

1. Issue:

/var/adm/messages and auth.log file not rotating.

2. Root Cause:

The log files /var/adm/messages and auth.log are not added in log rotation.
/var/log/messages was added and is rotating as per configuration.

3. Fix:

Need to add below two lines in /etc/logrotate.d/syslog file as first two lines:
/var/adm/messages
/var/adm/auth.log

4. Test the changes:

# kill -HUP `cat /var/run/syslogd.pid`
// It should rotate the file immediately.

Tags: AIXcentosetcfileslinuxloglogrotateredhatrotatersyslogsyslogsyslogdunix