I have Big Brother running on my network to make logging easier to keep track of.

One issue I have is that the BB user cannot read /var/log/messages. As I am on a RHEL5 system the log files are mainly owned by root:root and I want to keep myself from having to just add the BB user to the root group.

I've been looking at logrotate to see if it is possible to make /var/log/messages rotate using a different group(adm which I added BB to) but I don't know how to properly adjust it without causing changes with the other log files.

I tried adding a section to logrotate.conf but had an error there are well, it said that there were multiple entries for messages.

/var/log/messages {
weekly
create 0664 root adm
rotate 4
}

Probably because there were...

Check /etc/logrotate.d/syslog for the current /var/log/messages entry. Either tweak it there or have a look at logrotate(8) for tips on overriding the entry correctly.