logrotate: log does not need rotating

Question

logrotate is not rotating my logs

To verify that the logfile is not empty:

# ls -laFh /var/log/cisco-meraki.log
-rw-r----- 1 root adm 2.8G Sep  5 13:23 /var/log/cisco-meraki.log

Configuration (/etc/logrotate.d/zzzzz_default):

"/var/log/cisco-meraki.log" {
    daily
    rotate 10
    compress
    missingok
    notifempty
    create
}

Global config (logrotate.conf):

daily
rotate 10
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
}

Trying a manual run:

# logrotate --verbose -d zzzzz_default
reading config file zzzzz_default

Handling 1 logs

rotating pattern: "/var/log/cisco-meraki.log"  after 1 days (10 rotations)
empty log files are not rotated, old logs are removed
considering log /var/log/cisco-meraki.log
  log does not need rotating

To verify that the problem is not "allready rotated" I checked:

# cat /var/lib/logrotate/status|grep cisco
"/var/log/cisco-ace.log" 2016-1-19-16:0:0
"/var/log/cisco-pix.log" 2016-1-19-16:0:0
"/var/log/cisco-acs.log" 2016-1-19-16:0:0
"/var/log/cisco-asa.log" 2016-1-19-16:0:0
"/var/log/cisco-router.log" 2016-9-6-0:1:1
"/var/log/cisco-ips.log" 2016-1-19-16:0:0

..but no cisco-meraki.log

Astraphobia

Answer 1

From logrotate man page:

      -d, --debug
           Turns on debug mode and implies -v.  In debug mode, no
           changes will be made to the logs or to the logrotate
           state file.

I was hit with exactly the same issue !

N.

Extragalactic

Answer 2

see https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/96947

Lets say you created your zzzzz_default file today. logrotate will create an entry, as if it rotated the logs today in /var/lib/logrotate/status.

When you run logrotate --verbose -d zzzzz_default today logrotate checks the last time it rotated logs reading /var/lib/logrotate/status. It will find that entry it created before so it will say log does not need rotating

If you run logrotate --verbose -d zzzzz_default tomorrow logrotate checks the last time it rotated logs reading /var/lib/logrotate/status. It will not find that entry so it will rotate the log files.

Arroyo

Answer 3

I encountered the same problem, and finally found that it was a file permission problem, the configuration file must be set to root, and then use su in the configuration file.

sudo chown root:root /etc/logrotate.d/xxx

/var/log/xxx.log {
    su ec2-user ec2-user
    daily
    rotate 10
    compress
    missingok
    notifempty
    create 644 ec2-user ec2-user
}

if /etc/logrotate.d/xxx owner is ec2-user:ec2-user, execute sudo logrotate -f /etc/logrotate.d/xxx nothing happened.

Microscopic