Centos – Change the logs directory for CentOS

centoslog-files

The default directory in which the OS writes its logs is '/var/log/', I want to change that directory to another one that I create. How can I do that?

Note:

I tried changing the paths (/var/log/.) to (/var/tmp_log/.) in '/etc/rsyslog.conf', created the destination folder '/tmp_log/' and rebooted my PC but it just stopped writing new logs.

then tried to copy the original files from '/var/log/' to '/var/tmp_log/' and it didn't work either.

Best Answer

Have you also checked all other files inside /etc/rsyslog.d/ ?

/var/log is the default log folder for many other applications that don't necessarily depend on rsyslog. Apache for example doesn't use rsyslog so you'll have to change the config file of every application that writes to /var/log.

lsof +D /var/log/ will give you all processes that have open files inside that folder. Please note that this will only show processes that have the file OPEN. Some applications don't keep the file open all the time and only write to the logs in batches.

Another options would be to create your new folder /var/tmp_log/ and create a a symlink on /var/log pointing to it. Would that work ?

Related Solutions

Linux Logrotate – How to Rotate Logs of a Dumb Non-Interactive Application

Ignacio's answer intrigued me so I did some research and came up with the Perl script below. If your service will write to a named pipe it should work and be usable with logrotate.

For it to work you need to make your logfile into a named pipe. Rename the existing file then

mkfifo /var/log/something.log

and to edit the 3 filenames to meet your requirements. Run your service then this daemon which should read the named pipe and write it to a new logfile.

If you rename /var/log/somethingrotateable.log then send a HUP to the daemon it will spawn itself and create a new somethingrotateable.log to write to. If using logrotate a postrotate script of kill -HUP 'cat /var/run/yourpidfile.pid'

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use POSIX ();
use FindBin ();
use File::Basename ();
use File::Spec::Functions;
#
$|=1;
#
# Change the 3 filenames and paths below to meet your requirements.
#
my $FiFoFile = '/var/log/something.log';
my $LogFile = '/var/log/somethingrotateable.log';
my $PidFile = '/var/run/yourpidfile.pid';

# # make the daemon cross-platform, so exec always calls the script
# # itself with the right path, no matter how the script was invoked.
my $script = File::Basename::basename($0);
my $SELF = catfile $FindBin::Bin, $script;
#
# # POSIX unmasks the sigprocmask properly
my $sigset = POSIX::SigSet->new();
my $action = POSIX::SigAction->new('sigHUP_handler',$sigset,&POSIX::SA_NODEFER);
POSIX::sigaction(&POSIX::SIGHUP, $action);

sub sigHUP_handler {
#    print "Got SIGHUP";
    exec($SELF, @ARGV) or die "Couldn't restart: $!\n";
   }

#open the logfile to write to
open(LOGFILE, ">>$LogFile") or die "Can't open $LogFile";
open(PIDFILE, ">$PidFile") or die "Can't open PID File $PidFile";
print PIDFILE "$$\n";
close PIDFILE;
readLog();

sub readLog {
sysopen(FIFO, $FiFoFile,0)  or die "Can't open $FiFoFile";
while ( my $LogLine = <FIFO>) {
    print LOGFILE $LogLine;
   }
}

Centos – apache on centos 5.6 gives me permissions denied error

Usually that comes from Selinux not giving access to the folder. do

ls -alZ /var/www/

and if the html folder doesn't have the context system_u:object_r:httpd_sys_content_t, fix it with chcon

chcon -v -R --type=httpd_sys_content_t /var/www/html

http://wiki.centos.org/HowTos/SELinux

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Linux Logrotate – How to Rotate Logs of a Dumb Non-Interactive Application

Centos – apache on centos 5.6 gives me permissions denied error

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