Managing log files

[RaZor Edge]

Sorry if I asked many questions these past few days... but I think these questions can be helpful for me... and for others VPS newbies!!!

Anyway...

I was reading some posts about "log files managing" on webhostingtalk, and I must say that I'm a little bit confused.

Seems like the principals log file ares are located at these places:

/var/log
/var/log/messages (main server log)
/var/lib/mysql (mysql logs)
/usr/local/apache/logs
/usr/local/apache/domlogs
/etc/httpd/logs (same as above??)
/etc/httpd/domlogs (same as above???)

So...

1 - In /var/log, in addition to "message", there is many other files? Can we delete them all safely? (ex: message2 maillog mailog2 bootlog secure etc...)

2- If we delete a log file, must we restart the system? Or it will be re-created automaticaly?

3- Is ect/httpd/logs the same as /usr/local/apache/logs (only need to delete one)

4- What is the simple way to delete logs automaticaly (say, once every weeks). I have found this: http://httpd.apache.org/docs/1.3/logs.html#rotation, but i'm not really sure what to do...

Is there other thing I must known about this subject?

Thank you very much for your time!

[Andre]

You don't have to apologize for asking questions - that's what we're here for. Infact, I appreciate you posting these things here, so other customers can also benefit from it.

1. Many services (just about all system services) will store their log files in /var/log. Deleting them doesn't cause any problems but I would highly recommend to not delete them unless you really have a good reason to do so, since these logfiles are basically your only lead in case a problem appears.

2. That depends a bit per service. Some will recreate their logfile automatically when you restart the service, some will not. As I said it's better not to remove any log files at all though. You don't have to reboot the system. But just to make sure the logfiles are recreated properly it's useful to simply recreate the file yourself.

3. Yes. If you go to the /etc directory and enter "ls -la" you will see this:

lrwxrwxrwx   1 root     root        17 Oct 18 10:27 httpd -> /usr/local/apache/

The -> part means that /etc/httpd is a symlink to /usr/local/apache. So basically: when you go to /etc/httpd you are basically looking at the content of /usr/local/apache.

4. The best way to do that is to use a log rotator. Depending on which control panel you have that may be included by default. For in-depth help with this issue it would probably be best if you could open a support ticket, then our techs will help you out with it.