System Maintenance
 

I'm running SUSE 9.0 (Gnome desktop) as a Router/Frontend to a home network - I have Apache etc. set and all is running well....

I concerned about 2 things over time.

How to properly maintain system logs and system mail.


Are there specific generic system logs that I need to be checking to make sure they don't grow so large that they slow the system down?
Where and which ones should I be looking for?


On system mail is this a straight forward as dropping to a command line as root and typing in "mail" - or is there a gui function that I can use to check mail - or can I pick it up with my Ximian email?

Thanks

If you installed Suse/apache (etc) out of the box, you do not have to worry about logfiles growing too large. Suse installs, configures and runs logrotate.

man logrotate
/etc/logrotate.conf
/etc/logrotate.d/*

If you compile/install programs yourself (not from the suse cd's) you might want to edit these files.

Most logfiles are placed in /var/log, but some programs keep their logfiles 'close' (apache2 puts them in /usr/local/apache2/logs by default).

Manually going thru your logfiles isn't the way you want to do checks. You could use a tool like logcheck to do the checking and mail you the results. There are a lot of these tools, I like this one myself.

http://linux.maruhn.com/sec/logcheck.html

If you want to change/edit the messages and the way they are distributed, take a look at:
man syslogd
man syslog.conf
/etc/syslog.conf
/etc/sysconfig/syslog

Hope this helps.