Apple Mac OS X Server manual Local Logging

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The facility and priority are separated by a single period, and these are separated from the action by one or more tabs. Wildcards (“*”) may also be used in the configuration file. The following example line logs all messages of any facility or priority to the file /var/log/all.log:

*.* /var/log/all.log

See the syslog.conf man page for information about the configuration of this file.

Local Logging

The default configuration in /etc/syslog.conf is appropriate for a Mac OS X Server system if a remote log server is not available. The computer is set to rotate log files using a cron job at the time intervals specified in the file /etc/crontab. Rotation entails compressing the current log file, incrementing the integer in the filename of compressed log files, and creating a new log file for new messages. For example, the following files were created in the /var/log/ folder:

system.log

system.log.0.gz

system.log.1.gz

system.log.2.gz

system.log.3.gz

system.log.4.gz

The log files are rotated by a cron job, and the rotation will only occur if the computer is on when the job is scheduled. By default, the log rotation tasks are scheduled for very early in the morning (for example, 4:30 a.m. on Saturday) in order to be as unobtrusive as possible. If the computer will not be on at this time, adjust the settings in /etc/crontab.

For example, the following line shows the default for running the weekly log rotation script, which is configured for 4:15 a.m. on the last day of the week, Saturday (Sunday is 0). An asterisk denotes “any,” so a line of all asterisks would execute every minute.

DayOf DayOf

#Minute Hour Month Month Week User Command

15 4 * * 6 root periodic weekly

The following line would change the time to 12:15 p.m. on Tuesday, when the computer is much more likely to be on:

DayOf DayOf

#Minute Hour Month Month Week User Command 15 12 * * 2 root periodic weekly

See the crontab man page for more information about editing the /etc/crontab file.

Chapter 17 Configuring System Logging