Does anyone know a good link to a howto on common System maintenance tasks that need to be performed in order to keep a linux machine running smoothly. Like what log files to keep an eye on and archive/delete, or common tools that should be run to keep a system running quickly and cleaned up. It doesn't need to cover security updates or anything like that, I've got that covered, but a good system for keeping the system smooth and bug free (this is debian testing/unstable) would be great.

Most of that stuff should be automatically for you via the cron daemon.

You should have a cron script that rotates your log files. The logrotate program can rotate them on a weekly or daily basis, and keep a backlog of whatever length you set. It will also compress the backlogs so they don't take up as much storage space. Usually the configuration file is found in /etc/logrotate.

There should also be a cron script that updates the slocate database. Other then that, I can't think of a whole lot of things you should have to do on a regular basis besides backup data.

what about apache's access logs?
I am looking for a howto also... need some background info before I setup any of these because of the log analyzer. Are there any Howto's out there?
Thanks all!