Hi,

Because of a stupid bug in Gentoo that doesn't seem to be fixed (http://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=40304) I have lost half of my /var/log files... forever! I need to fix it but...

This are the files that the cron script has chown'd to root:adm and chmod'd to 0640:

auth.log
cron.log
daemon.log
debug
imapd.log
kern.log
lpr.log
mail.err
mail.info
mail.log
mail.warn
messages
ppp.log
syslog
user.log
uucp.log

It seems that for example postfix cannot write to mail.* files, and so on: all of them are 0 bytes long.

If there is anyone using Gentoo in its Linode, could you tell me what user:group and chmod do they have? I don't know where can I look for this information...

Thank you!

Hi,

It seems that some services were broken. I've reboot and some of that files are now written.

Thank you anyway

Yeah ... Most are owned by root, anyhow. From the Gentoo 2005 template image:

bash-2.05b# ls -al /var/log/
total 3
drwxr-xr-x   3 root    root    1024 Sep 14  2004 .
drwxr-xr-x  12 root    root    1024 Jun 30  2004 ..
-rw-r--r--   1 root    root       0 Mar 30 18:14 auth.log
-rw-r--r--   1 root    root       0 Mar 30 18:14 daemon.log
-rw-r--r--   1 root    root       0 Mar 30 18:14 debug
-rw-rw----   1 portage portage    0 Mar 30 18:14 emerge.log
-rw-r--r--   1 root    root       0 Sep 14  2004 imapd.log
-rw-r--r--   1 root    root       0 Mar 30 18:14 kern.log
-rw-r--r--   1 root    root       0 Mar 30 18:14 lastlog
-rw-r--r--   1 root    root       0 Sep 14  2004 lpr.log
-rw-r--r--   1 root    root       0 Sep 14  2004 mail.err
-rw-r--r--   1 root    root       0 Sep 14  2004 mail.info
-rw-r--r--   1 root    root       0 Sep 14  2004 mail.log
-rw-r--r--   1 root    root       0 Sep 14  2004 mail.warn
-rw-r--r--   1 root    root       0 Mar 30 18:14 messages
drwxr-xr-x   2 root    root    1024 Sep 14  2004 news
-rw-r--r--   1 root    root       0 Sep 14  2004 ppp.log
-rw-r--r--   1 root    root       0 Mar 30 18:14 syslog
-rw-r--r--   1 root    root       0 Sep 14  2004 user.log
-rw-r--r--   1 root    root       0 Sep 14  2004 uucp.log
-rw-rw-r--   1 root    utmp       0 Mar 30 18:15 wtmp

-Chris

Note: postfix doesn't write to files but sends its logs to syslog. You might want to restart syslog (it may have been stopped or the files moved without it being sent a SIGHUP).

Thank you! I was confused because I didn't know what gyver says. It was syslog which was down (why???)

Anyhow, thank you for your help. I've checked my list against caker's and it seems to be ok now.