[Fedora] Sendmail's 2GiB limit?

Craig White craig at tobyhouse.com
Tue Feb 20 22:57:34 UTC 2007


On Tue, 2007-02-20 at 15:47 -0700, Ashley M. Kirchner wrote:
> Craig White wrote:
> > I use RHEL/CentOS for servers and they rotate syslog(s) every week, not
> > every month. I'm surprised that Fedora would do differently than RHEL.
> >   
>     I didn't say that it's Fedora's default rotation, did I?  I said WE 
> rotate once a month.  In other words, WE adjust our rotation 
> configuration to do it once a month, and WE keep 12 months worth of logs.
> 
>     However, this isn't about the rotation frequency.  I can hit 2GiB in 
> a week easily, but that's not the problem here.  This is about the 
> *limitation* that sysklogd has and the question as to WHY.  There's, in 
> my mind, absolutely no reason for this limitation, and yet it seems to 
> have escaped everyone, probably because everyone rotate every week.
----
as Jim pointed out, the 2Gb file limitation is because of limitations of
unsigned integer of 32 bit OS. Moreover, performance deteriorates when
syslog has to log to the end of very large log files and it makes more
sense to log more frequently and probably automatically tar/gzip them.
Whatever amounts you retain, the style of retention (compressed or
uncompressed), and the frequency of rotation are clearly under your
control.

Craig




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