Posts Tagged ‘notifempty’

Linux: logrotate fix log file permissions on newly created logs after rotation

Monday, July 5th, 2021

fix logrotate permission issues of newly logrotated files, howto chown chmod logrotate linux logo

If you have to administer a bunch of Web or Application servers you will definetely end up with some machines that has some logrotate misconfiguration.

Perhaps the most common one sysadmin faces is when you have rotated webserver, proxy, mail server logs that gets gzipped with a date timestamp of the rotation and a brand new files is created by logrotate. Such a thing could be seen on various Linux distributions and even a more corporate prodcution ready Linux – es like CentOS and Fedora occasionally end up with issues caused by improperly created user / group permissions (usually root:root) of logrotate. 

The wrong permissions of usually normally logging to file by a service, happens when the log file will get filled (or matches some thresholds) configured by logrotate respective config, the log rotate mechanism will rename this file gzip / bzip it depending on how it is prepared to behave and opens a new one, however the newly produced log file will not have the  read write  permission which are necessery for the respective service because the service is not running as administrator (root), lets say there is a haproxy daemon running with user / group haproxy, haproxy, like it happeed today on one of our legacy CentOS 6.5 servers.

The sad result is /var/log/haproxy.log or whatever log file stays empty forever even though the service is normally working and you end up blind not seeing what's going on …

To solve the empty file due to logrotate dumping the original file permissions to a wrong one due to misconfiguration or a lack of special configuration it is as easy as setting up the logrotated file to write down the new rotated file to a specic user, this is done with a one line addition of code with a syntax like:

create mode owner group

Below is extract from logrotate man page (man logrotate)

Immediately after rotation (before the postrotate script is run) the log file is created (with the same name as the log file just rotated).  mode  specifies the mode for the log file in octal (the same as chmod(2)), owner specifies the user name who will own the log file, and group specifies the group the log file will belong to. Any of the log file attributes may be omitted, in which case those attributes for the new file will use the same values as the original log file for the omitted attributes. This option can be disabled using the nocreate option.

 Lets say you have following /etc/logrotate.d/haproxy configuration that is instructing logrotate to do the rotation and this will create empty file with root:root after rotate:

root@haproxy2:/etc/logrotate.d# cat haproxy

/var/log/haproxy.log {
    daily
    rotate 52
    missingok
    notifempty
    compress
    delaycompress
    postrotate
        /usr/lib/rsyslog/rsyslog-rotate
    endscript
}

To make /var/log/haproxy.log be owned by haproxy user and group and chmod to certain owner permissions hence, do add inside the block something like: 

 

/var/log/haproxy.log {
….
        create 664 user group
….
}


i.e. :

/var/log/haproxy.log {
….
        create 644 haproxy hapoxy
….
}

To test the configuration do a logrotate config dry run do:

root@haproxy2:/etc/logrotate.d# logrotate -v -d -f /etc/logrotate.d/haproxy
WARNING: logrotate in debug mode does nothing except printing debug messages!  Consider using verbose mode (-v) instead if this is not what you want.

reading config file /etc/logrotate.d/haproxy
Reading state from file: /var/lib/logrotate/status
Allocating hash table for state file, size 64 entries
Creating new state
Creating new state
Creating new state
Creating new state
Creating new state
Creating new state
Creating new state
Creating new state
Creating new state
Creating new state
Creating new state
Creating new state

 

Handling 1 logs

rotating pattern: /var/log/haproxy.log  forced from command line (52 rotations)
empty log files are not rotated, old logs are removed
considering log /var/log/haproxy.log
  Now: 2021-07-05 21:51
  Last rotated at 2021-07-05 00:00
  log needs rotating
rotating log /var/log/haproxy.log, log->rotateCount is 52
dateext suffix '-20210705'
glob pattern '-[0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9]'
compressing log with: /bin/gzip

renaming /var/log/haproxy.log.8.gz to /var/log/haproxy.log.9.gz (rotatecount 52, logstart 1, i 8),
renaming /var/log/haproxy.log.7.gz to /var/log/haproxy.log.8.gz (rotatecount 52, logstart 1, i 7),
renaming /var/log/haproxy.log.6.gz to /var/log/haproxy.log.7.gz (rotatecount 52, logstart 1, i 6),
renaming /var/log/haproxy.log.5.gz to /var/log/haproxy.log.6.gz (rotatecount 52, logstart 1, i 5),
renaming /var/log/haproxy.log.4.gz to /var/log/haproxy.log.5.gz (rotatecount 52, logstart 1, i 4),
renaming /var/log/haproxy.log.3.gz to /var/log/haproxy.log.4.gz (rotatecount 52, logstart 1, i 3),
renaming /var/log/haproxy.log.2.gz to /var/log/haproxy.log.3.gz (rotatecount 52, logstart 1, i 2),
renaming /var/log/haproxy.log.1.gz to /var/log/haproxy.log.2.gz (rotatecount 52, logstart 1, i 1),
renaming /var/log/haproxy.log.0.gz to /var/log/haproxy.log.1.gz (rotatecount 52, logstart 1, i 0),
log /var/log/haproxy.log.53.gz doesn't exist — won't try to dispose of it
renaming /var/log/haproxy.log to /var/log/haproxy.log.1
creating new /var/log/haproxy.log mode = 0644 uid = 106 gid = 112
running postrotate script
running script with arg /var/log/haproxy.log: "
        /usr/lib/rsyslog/rsyslog-rotate
"

 

 

root@haproxy2:/etc/logrotate.d# grep -Ei '106|112' /etc/passwd
haproxy:x:106:112::/var/lib/haproxy:/usr/sbin/nologin

You do it for any other service respectively by editting whatever /etc/logrotate.d/file, lets say postfix's /var/log/maillog should be owned with 644 by postfix:postfix.
 

# cat /etc/logrotate/postfix
/var/log/maillog {
….
        create 664 postfix postfix
….
}

Recommended logrorate practices on heavy loaded (busy) Apache Linux servers

Wednesday, March 7th, 2012

Apache logrotate Debian good configuration for heavy loaded servers

If you are sys admin of Apache Webserver running on Debian Linux relying on logrorate to rorate logs, you might want to change the default way logroration is done.

Little changes in the way Apache log files are served on busy servers can have positive outcomes on the overall way the server CPU units burden. A good logrotation strategy can also prevent your server from occasional extra overheads or downtimes.

The way Debian GNU / Linux process logs is well planned for small servers, however the default logroration Apache routine doesn't fit well for servers which process millions of client requests each day.

I happen to administrate, few servers which are constantly under a heavy load and have occasionally overload troubles because of Debian's logrorate default mechanism.

To cope with the situation I have made few modifications to /etc/logrorate.d/apache2 and decided to share it here hoping, this might help you too.

1. Rotate Apache acccess.log log file daily instead of weekly

On Debian Apache's logrorate script is in /etc/logrotate.d/apache2

The default file content will be like so like so:

debian:~# cat /etc/logrotate.d/apache2
/var/log/apache2/*.log {
weekly
missingok
rotate 52
size 1G
compress
delaycompress
notifempty
create 640 root adm
sharedscripts
postrotate
if [ -f "`. /etc/apache2/envvars ; echo ${APACHE_PID_FILE:-/var/run/apache2.pid}`" ]; then
/etc/init.d/apache2 reload > /dev/null
fi
endscript
}

To change the rotation from weekly to daily change:

weekly

to

#weekly

2. Disable access.log log file gzip compression

By default apache2 logrotate script is tuned ot make compression of rotated file (exmpl: copy access.log to access.log.1 and gzip it, copy access.log to access.log.2 and gzip it etc.). On servers where logs are many gigabytes, once logrotate initiates its scheduled work it will have to compress an enormous log record of apache requests. On very busy Apache servers from my experience, just for a day the log could grow up to approximately 8 / 10 Gigabytes.
I'm sure there are more busy servers out there, which log files are growing to over 100GB for just a single day.
Gzipping a 100GB file piece takes an enormous load on the CPU, as well as often takes long time. When this logrotation gzipping occurs at a moment where the servers CPU cores are already heavy loaded from Apache serving HTTP requests, Apache server becomes inaccessible to most of the clients.
Then for end clients various oddities are experienced, for example Apache dropped connection errors, webserver returning empty pages, or simply inability to respond to the client browser.
Sometimes as a result of the overload, even secure shell connection to SSHD to the server is impossible …

To prevent your server from this roration overloads remove logrorate's default access.log gzipping by commenting:

compress

to

#comment

3. Change maximum log roration by logrorate to be up to 30

By default logrorate is configured to create and keep up to 52 rotated and gzipped access.log files, changing this to a lower number is a good practice (in my view), in cases where log files grow daily to 10 or more GBs. Doing so will save a lot of disk space and reduce the chance the hard disk gets filled in because of the multiple rorated ungzipped enormous access.log files.

To tune the default keep max rorated logs to 30, change:

rotate 52

to rotate 30

The way logrorate's apache log processing on RHEL / CentOS Linux is working better on high load servers, by default on CentOS logrorate is not configured to do log gzipping at all.

Here is the default /etc/logrorate.d/httpd script for
CentOS release 5.6 (Final)

[hipo@centos httpd]$ cat /etc/logrotate.d/httpd /var/log/httpd/*log {
missingok
notifempty
sharedscripts
postrotate
/bin/kill -HUP `cat /var/run/httpd.pid 2>/dev/null` 2> /dev/null || true
endscript
}