My first article ...

My first article ... Not sure where this will go but we will see what the future brings. I will try to put some professional experiences here ...
For example last week I was confronted with a few ESX-servers installed with tiny partitions, and no separate partition for /var/log ...
A best practice should be to provide a separate partition for /var or /var/log.But of course if it's installed this way you have to live with it ...
I used a standard feature of most Linux/Unix machines that is also included in ESX 2.5/3.0 : "logrotate" ...
Here the procedure :


On ESX servers there should be separate partitions for /var and/or /var/log, if those partitions are to small or integrated in to the "/"-partition it can destabilize the ESX-server.

To adjust the automatic logrotate/Cleanup please use this procedure :

1. SSH-logon to the ESX-server
2. su to get root permissions
3. vi /etc/logrotate.conf --> changes are in red
   
   # see "man logrotate" for details
   # rotate log files weekly
   weekly
   # keep 4 weeks worth of backlogs
   rotate 2
   # create new (empty) log files after rotating old onescreate
   # uncomment this if you want your log files compressed
   compress
   # RPM packages drop log rotation information into this directoryinclude /etc/logrotate.d
   # no packages own lastlog or wtmp -- we'll rotate them here
   /var/log/wtmp {
   monthly
   create 0664 root utmp
   rotate 1
   }
   # system-specific logs may be also be configured here.
   
   
4. vi /etc/logrotate.d/vmkernel --> changes are in red
   
   /var/log/vmkernel {
   missingok
   compress
   # keep a history over 3 years.
   weekly
   rotate 2
   # max log size of 200k (thus limiting total disk usage to under 8megs)
   size 100k
   sharedscripts
   postrotate
   /bin/kill -HUP `cat /var/run/syslogd.pid 2> /dev/null` 2> /dev/null true
   endscript
   }
   
   
5. run this command : "/usr/sbin/logrotate -f /etc/logrotate.conf"
6. go to the /var/log dir and cleanup, a last time manually, all log-files with an extension greater or equal then .2
7. exit