We have an AWS EC2 with Debian and logrotate.
One day its root partition was exhausted and when I started investigating it – found, that we have a bunch of files like /var/log/syslog.N.gz.
At the same time by default logrotate creates a config file to rotate syslog log files:
root@monitoring-dev:~# cat /etc/logrotate.d/syslog
# Ansible managed
/var/log/syslog {
size 10M
rotate 1
daily
...
}
Thus, we must have only files syslog + syslog.1, but instead:
root@monitoring-dev:~# ll /var/log/ | grep syslog
-rw-r----- 1 root adm 11925 Oct 9 09:26 syslog
-rw-r----- 1 root adm 361150 Oct 9 06:25 syslog.1
-rw-r----- 1 root adm 7712 Oct 8 06:25 syslog.2.gz
-rw-r----- 1 root adm 7562 Oct 7 06:25 syslog.3.gz
-rw-r----- 1 root adm 7832 Oct 6 06:25 syslog.4.gz
-rw-r----- 1 root adm 7720 Oct 5 06:25 syslog.5.gz
-rw-r----- 1 root adm 7641 Oct 4 06:25 syslog.6.gz
-rw-r----- 1 root adm 8072 Oct 3 06:25 syslog.7.gz
Let’s check – run logrotate with the --debug option:
root@monitoring-dev:~# logrotate -d /etc/logrotate.conf
reading config file /etc/logrotate.conf
error: /etc/logrotate.conf:5 unknown group 'syslog'
removing last 0 log configs
unknown group ‘syslog’
And here is our error.
The error appears because of the fact that Debian OS has no the syslog users group, but instead, it has an adm group which is the default user group for log-files.
Check the /etc/logrotate.conf content:
# Ansible managed
# see "man logrotate" for details
weekly
su root syslog
...
And check existing users groups:
root@monitoring-dev:~# cat /etc/group
root:x:0:
daemon:x:1:
bin:x:2:
sys:x:3:
adm:x:4:admin
...
Replace syslog with adm:
# Ansible managed
# see "man logrotate" for details
weekly
su root adm
...
And check again:
root@monitoring-dev:~# logrotate -d /etc/logrotate.conf
reading config file /etc/logrotate.conf
including /etc/logrotate.d
reading config file apt
reading config file certbot
reading config file chrony
reading config file daemonlog
reading config file dpkg
...
Reading state from file: /var/lib/logrotate/status
Allocating hash table for state file, size 64 entries
...
Done.
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