well, by syslog isn't exactly missing, but ...

Today my server was mysteriously unresponsive; that is, ssh to its IP
address did not work.

So I went over to it, and found the screen blanl.
I tried directly into its keyboard (and yes, at this point I had checked
that that power was on and the relevant cables were connected.
No luck.

I finally rebooted it. (A convenience that's easy to do when it's
physically in your living room).

It rebooted cleanly, recovered its file systems (quite easy 'cause the
ones I use are EXT4, although there is a Reiser filesystem lurking
somewhere too), and requested a login on its console screen.

And after that, ssh'ing into it worked again.

Now this has happened before, about a month ago.

I decided to investigate and started by looking into /var/log/syslog.

Which was full of entried from May, none from this month.
And yes, it knows the date is Tue Jul 27 12:19:45 EDT 2021.

I did a ls -l on syslog*

april:~# ls -l /var/log/syslog*
-rw-r----- 1 root adm 734459 May 17 2013 /var/log/syslog
-rw-r----- 1 root adm 1197017 May 17 2013 /var/log/syslog.0
-rw-r----- 1 root adm 79876 May 13 2013 /var/log/syslog.1.gz
-rw-r----- 1 root adm 127547 May 12 2013 /var/log/syslog.2.gz
-rw-r----- 1 root adm 51821 May 10 2013 /var/log/syslog.3.gz
-rw-r----- 1 root adm 44679 May 9 2013 /var/log/syslog.4.gz
-rw-r----- 1 root adm 46240 May 8 2013 /var/log/syslog.5.gz
-rw-r----- 1 root adm 41297 May 7 2013 /var/log/syslog.6.gz
april:~#

It looks like nothing has been written to syslog for the last eight
years!

And in all that time I hadn't noticed.

It is still running ascii, by the way. I'm pretty sure ascii wasn't
around yet in 2013, back when I was still running Debian.

So why no system log?

And, while I'm asking anyway, why no /var/log/mail* since 2013 either?

What has changed?
What might have changed?

-- hendrik