Logrotate behaving unexpectedly

Question

Find below the logrotate configuration that I'm using

/usr/local/nagios/var/nagios.log {
    copytruncate
    daily
    rotate 7
    compress
    missingok
    size 100M
}

And I could notice that the status file /var/lib/logrotate.status is getting updated with current date daily but the log file is not getting rotated and it's growing in GB's until the disk get filled.

What would be the problem?

Answer 1

The problem is likely that Nagios is never killed/restarted so that it starts logging to a new log file. Here are a couple examples that show how you'd go about doing the postrotate action.

/var/log/nagios/nagios.log {
daily
rotate 180
compress
dateext
missingok
notifempty
sharedscripts
postrotate
        /sbin/service nagios reload > /dev/null 2>/dev/null || true
endscript
}

Or something more direct:

/var/log/nagios/nagios.log {
    missingok
    postrotate
        /bin/kill -HUP `cat /var/run/nagios.pid 2> /dev/null` 2> /dev/null || true
    endscript
}

Letting Nagios do it

However in newer versions of Nagios it actually will rotate its own log files. The included logrotate configuration file even states as much.

On a Fedora 19 install of Nagios version 3.5.1-1:

$ more /etc/logrotate.d/nagios
# Important!  Nagios rotates its own logs.  Only enable this logrotate if you
# know what you are doing!

# For more information please see "log_rotate_method" in: 
# /etc/nagios/nagios.cfg

# ----- logrotate config -------------
#/var/log/nagios/*.log {
#       missingok
#       weekly
#       notifempty
#       nocompress
#       create 644 nagios nagios
#}