Question: do you have /var mounted on a separate partition?  I
encountered some weird behavior when I attempted to do so.  That is,
there were files opened before the mount command was issued, resulting
in some weird things like that.


Hendrik Boom wrote:
> 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
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