Managing Server Log Files

Your Virtual Private Server uses log files to record E-mail, FTP, and Web activity on your server. These log files can be used for debugging problems, tracking abuse, and analyzing traffic to your site.

Web Log Files

Web activity is tracked in your Web Server Log Files.

E-mail and FTP Log File

E-mail and FTP activity is recorded in the ~/var/log/messages file. This records POP and IMAP connections (checking E-mail), all SMTP activity (sending and recieving E-mail), and FTP connections and transfers.

Managing Log file Size

Because any E-mail, FTP, or Web activity will add to your log files, they can grow quite quickly. Because of how quickly they can grow, it is important to clear them on an occasional basis. How often you need to do this depends greatly on how you use your logs, and how much traffic your Virtual Private Server has.

There are a number of Web logfile analyzers which can also be used to clear out your Web log files. These will not affect your messages file in any way. If you are using a Web Log analyzer or any other program to clear your Web log files, you will need to clear out your messages file separately. The easiest way to do this is to create an entry similar to the following in your Cron File.

0 1 * * 0 /bin/cat /dev/null > $HOME/var/log/messages

The vnukelog utility

In order to make managing your server log files easier, we have created a utility to clear out your server log files. The vnukelog command can be used to clear the ~/usr/log/messages file as well as all Web Server Log Files and Virtual Subhost log files.

Use the -h flag to see all vnukelog options:

% vnukelog -h
Usage: vnukelog [-h] [-i] [-r]
   -h   display this message
   -i   enter interactive mode
   -r   nuke root server logs only
Use no options to nuke all log files on the Virtual Private Servers.

Use the vnukelog command without any flags to clear the ~/usr/log/messages file and ALL Virtual Private Servers and Virtual Subhost log files:

% vnukelog

Use the -r flag to clear just the Virtual Private Servers log files, and leave the Virtual Subhost log files intact:

% vnukelog -r

Use the -i flag to enter an interactive mode that allows you to clear just the Virtual Private Server and Virtual Subhost log files you want to clear.

% vnukelog -i

You can easily use the Cron program scheduler feature to schedule vnukelog to regularly nuke your Virtual Private Servers log files. Add something like this to your crontab:

0 1 1 1-12/3 *   /usr/local/bin/vnukelog

This will run the command /usr/local/bin/vnukelog (which clears all of your Virtual Private Server log files) at 1 AM on the first day of the first month of every quarter, or January, April, July, and October (1-12/3).