Hello,

I have recently (one month ago) installed debian unstable on my new machine. I think logrotation is not really working, /var/log/messages and /var/log/kern.log are 8 MB already and haven't been rotated once.

Am I correct that debian should have, for each logfile to rotate, something in /etc/logrotate.d/ ?
Since /etc/logrotate.conf has

# packages drop log rotation information into this directory
include /etc/logrotate.d

These files are in my /etc/logrotate.d:
aptitude base-config cupsys dpkg exim4-base ppp

But none of them mention /var/log/messages or kern.log
On my other machine (installed about 8 months ago, debian unstable), where weekly rotation is working, I don't find any differences.

Anyone knows where the logrotate scripts are?

Thanks in advance!

Read the logrotate man page. It tells you how to configure logrotate.

I know how to set up logrotate. But I don't want to set it up manually because probably the debian installer has already set something up to rotate my log files, and I don't want to make a mess. So I want to find why logrotation is working on one system but not on the other.
In the mean time I have found out (check /usr/share/doc/logrotate) that syslogd uses its own script to rotate logs (i.e. NOT logrotate). Two scripts can be found in /etc/cron.daily and /etc/cron.weekly, but again the scripts on my two systems are identical.
I think there is a problem with cron, but I'll have to take some time to check that.

I'll post the solution if I find one...
'man cron'

If the machine is shutoff at about 6:30am local time IIRC then the proper cron jobs will not be run you would need to have the anacron package installed then this will check if the jobs have been run on next boot if not it will run them.

Thank you HappyTux!

Installing anacron solved the problem. My other system (where logrotation was working) is always on, but this system is off at night.

another happy penguin