Strange behaviour in logging files and log rotatation, hopefully an easy answer?

[John Summerfied]

Bob Brennan wrote:
> I host some relatively steady volume virtual domains and in order to
> keep the log access files to a reasonable size I logrotate them once
> every night and only keep 10 days worth. The logrotate works fine with
> typically
>   access_log
>   access_log.1
>   access_log.2
>   .3 .4 .5 etc
> happening as expected, the problem is that only one of those files
> receives the log information, even as it's name changes! So typically
> access_log.1, .2, .3 for instance are all 0b while .4 continues to
> grow into the megabytes until it is deleted.

<snip>

> 
> Any help/pointers/ideas greatly appreciated, I can't even think what to google.

Many years ago, when I was setting up RHL 3.0.3 or so, I read the 
instructions for rotating Apache logs.

On *x you can rename files while they're open and that's what you're 
doing. Changing the file's name does not affect rw operations for 
technical reasons I won't go into beyond noting that the name of a file 
is not its real identifier, just as a host name is not the real 
identifier for a computer - both are aliases that have to be converted 
to numbers.

What you need to do is make Apache reopen its files, and this is 
accomplished by the various reload/restart options.



-- 

Cheers
John

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