logwatch shows last year's data from yum.log

[David Timms]

Ian Mortimer wrote:
> On Tue, 2007-04-03 at 09:47 -0700, Knute Johnson wrote:
> 
>> I looked at my logwatch email this morning and saw a bunch of updates 
>> but the one that surprised me was kernel.i686.2.6.16-1.2080_FC5.  The 
>> logwatch program apparently picked up last years data out of the 
>> yum.log.  Is this a bug that any body would care about and want 
>> reported?
> 
> It's a feature of syslog rather than a bug in logwatch.  If you look
> at the dates in yum.log (or any other syslog generated file), you'll 
> see it doesn't include the year so logwatch has no way of knowing 
> those entries were last years.
> 
> Other log files get rotated so it's never a problem but yum.log doesn't
> get rotated (by default).
Mine (FC6) seem to, without anything done on my part:
$ su -c 'ls -l /var/log/yum.log*'
-rw------- 1 root root 11169 Apr  8 15:06 /var/log/yum.log
-rw------- 1 root root 42066 Mar 21 23:30 /var/log/yum.log.1
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 31469 Nov 22 18:27 /var/log/yum.log.2

However, it seems they mightn't be rolled over due to date, but rather 
size. Take a look at /etc/logrotate.d/yum

In fact in trying to trace any problem, it is a reasonable history of 
what has changed since initial install. It's good that I have package 
install / removal history from more than 4 weeks ago - actually right 
back to 2006-10-29.

Perhaps if there have not been many package changes, the size factor 
hasn't caused the logs to be rolled over. Another possibility is that 
the PC is never on at 04:00 Sun, and anacron is not running as a service.

DaveT.