Logrotate error for fail2ban

fail2banlogrotate

I get the following error when running a cron job, and I'm not too sure how to go about fixing. This is on Ubuntu 12.04 LTS.

test -x /usr/sbin/anacron || ( cd / && run-parts --report /etc/cron.daily )

/etc/cron.daily/logrotate:
error: error running non-shared postrotate script for /var/log/fail2ban.log of '/var/log/fail2ban.log '
run-parts: /etc/cron.daily/logrotate exited with return code 1

Here is the contents of /etc/logrotate.d/fail2ban

/var/log/fail2ban.log {

    weekly
    rotate 4
    compress

    delaycompress
    missingok
    postrotate
    fail2ban-client set logtarget /var/log/fail2ban.log >/dev/null
    endscript

    # If fail2ban runs as non-root it still needs to have write access
    # to logfiles.
    # create 640 fail2ban adm
    create 640 root adm
}

Here is the /etc/cron.daily/logrotate file

#!/bin/sh

# Clean non existent log file entries from status file
cd /var/lib/logrotate
test -e status || touch status
head -1 status > status.clean
sed 's/"//g' status | while read logfile date
do
    [ -e "$logfile" ] && echo "\"$logfile\" $date"
done >> status.clean
mv status.clean status

test -x /usr/sbin/logrotate || exit 0
/usr/sbin/logrotate /etc/logrotate.conf

Best Answer

ERROR Unable to contact server. Is it running?

Your fail2ban service isn't running start it!

service fail2ban start

or whatever starts it on your Ubuntu.

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Cron – Logrotate ERROR: No file found for /var/log/apache/error.log

Ok, it seems that it has nothing to do with logrotate. I think the errors you see are from fail2ban which is looking for these files. Try tu run manually the postscript from fail2ban in /etc/logrotate.d/fail2ban (o something like that) and you will see the errors.

Ubuntu – Logrotate: rotate all log files on specific size and rotate hourly

In order for it to have any effect, the cron script must be run at least as often as you want to rotate the files. Even though you are currently running the script once a day (from cron.daily), it will only change the files once a week (the weekly keyword in the logrotate script sets the default, this is overriden to monthly in the case of wtmp and btmp).

The version of logrotate on my nearest Linux box only does down to daily duration (although setting a size limit will force files to be rotated more frequently). Having said that, for most servers, log rotation is disruptive; if your objective is to conserve space then it might be more approriate to keep fewer history files and to compress them:

daily rotate 2 compress size 5M create include /etc/logrotate.d

/var/log/wtmp { missingok monthly create 0664 root utmp rotate 1 }
/var/log/btmp { missingok monthly create 0660 root utmp rotate 1 }

(Note the changes in the first line will have no effect if they are overridden elsewhere.)

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