[OpenAFS-devel] rethinking log rotation

[Michael Meffie]

On Thu, 29 Jan 2015 10:29:25 -0500
Steve Simmons <scs@umich.edu> wrote:

> On Jan 28, 2015, at 11:03 AM, chas williams - CONTRACTOR <chas@cmf.nrl.navy.mil> wrote:
> 
> > You could actually make bosserver forward the 'reopen the logs' signal
> > to the various processes.  logrotate certainly supports this for httpd
> > -- it has at least two log files that need rotated on the same signal.
> 
> This. Logrotate already has the tools to make this happen in a safe manner (no data loss). But it requires a command-line interface so logrotate can tell the application to simply close and re-open the log file. It works for [r]syslogd, httpd, etc, etc. A bos command that tells the running *server utils to close/reopen the logs is all that's needed.
> 
> I am *strongly* opposed to building our own log rotation stuff inside bos/etc; ultimately you wind up replicating what logrotate already does for you. And usually in a less flexible manner. 

Thank you. To be clear; No one has proposed putting log rotation logic in the 
servers, only to add the signal handling to close re-open the log file
handles (as is done for the mrafs-style logs), and to remove the renaming of <log>
to <log>.old on process restarts.

This last part (the removal of renaming to <log>.old) is a change that probably
makes sense since bosserver weekly restarts have not be the default for quite a
long while.

Thanks,
Mike

-- 
Michael Meffie <mmeffie@sinenomine.net>