On Tue, Jul 27, 2021 at 06:52:30PM +0100, Simon Hobson wrote:
> Hendrik Boom <hendrik@???> wrote:
>
> > 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!
>
> This may seem a stupid question ...
> But you have checked the contents of the files haven't you ? I.e. checked that they were that old, and don't just have the wrong timestamp due to "some unknown problem" ?

Yes.

Each syslog entry is a line of text starting with a date and time in May and is consistent with the file date.
The date does not mention a year, but I presume it refers to a date in 2013.
In any case, if they were current they would refer to July instead.

-- hendrik