I didn't receive my usual LogWatch email this morning from my FC3 box and I'm a little concerned. Here's what I might have done to bugger it up:

My log files had become choked with messages generated during setup and testing. So, last night I backed up /var/log/* and set about resetting the logs manually (emptying them of content with vi), then rebooted just for the hell of it.

I have looked through the logs manually this morning and everything seems to be logging normally, and for the first time I had a pretty good idea that what I was seeing was actually pertinent to the functioning of my server in the last twelve hours or so.

I just wanna know: why might my actions have caused LogWatch to stop sending? Can I make it do its thing (as sepcified in /etc/cron.daily) from the command line? Thanks!

you can run logwatch directly from the command line.

When your prompt is back, you will probably have your mailed logs

Wow, thanks for the quick reply!

I'm clearly an idiot. By default (as specified in /etc/log.d/logwatch.conf) Logwatch sends log activity for YESTERDAY, but I had erased yesterday's log activity, Duh.

By backing up the confing and by changing output to stdout instead of email I saw what I wanted to see.

Actually I saw something I didn't want to see. but that's another thread.