On Apr 27, 2009, at 9:12 AM, Len Gerstel wrote:
> > I guess I will still need to run them OCCASIONALLY on my work Mac > running 10.4.11 since I shut that down every night. This is another problem that was bigger in earlier versions of OS X. In 10.1 and 10.2 people were finding their systems slowed to a crawl after 7-10 months of use; this was because the system logs were growing to an unmanageable size. Thus Onyx and MacJanitor were born. Since then OSX has modified it's log handling routines (primarily to put a cap on file size...when a file gets to be too big, it does a logrotate call then rather than waiting for it to get called when the periodic script calls it), systems have come with more memory, larger hard drives and faster processors thus ameliorating the problems considerably. You still don't want the log files to grow too large, but the issue is less pressing. Fire up terminal occasionally and do: ls -l /var/log And see what you get. Note those files sizes are listed in 1 Kb blocks. If they're upwards of 250Mb, time to rotate the logs. The ones that grow the most are system.log and secure.log; this is what they look like on my work system: -rw-r----- 1 root admin 78604 Apr 27 08:08 secure.log -rw-r----- 1 root admin 5492 Apr 22 04:00 secure.log.0.bz2 -rw-r----- 1 root admin 5983 Apr 19 18:00 secure.log.1.bz2 -rw-r----- 1 root admin 7458 Apr 19 11:00 secure.log.2.bz2 -rw-r----- 1 root admin 7062 Apr 19 00:00 secure.log.3.bz2 -rw-r----- 1 root admin 6824 Apr 18 13:00 secure.log.4.bz2 -rw-r----- 1 root admin 7452 Apr 18 06:00 secure.log.5.bz2 -rw-r----- 1 root admin 13094 Apr 27 09:31 system.log -rw-r----- 1 root admin 2776 Apr 27 00:00 system.log.0.bz2 -rw-r----- 1 root admin 2508 Apr 26 00:00 system.log.1.bz2 -rw-r----- 1 root admin 4931 Apr 25 00:00 system.log.2.bz2 -rw-r----- 1 root admin 4668 Apr 24 00:00 system.log.3.bz2 -rw-r----- 1 root admin 5989 Apr 23 00:00 system.log.4.bz2 -rw-r----- 1 root admin 5653 Apr 22 00:00 system.log.5.bz2 -rw-r----- 1 root admin 4961 Apr 21 00:00 system.log.6.bz2 -rw-r----- 1 root admin 2426 Apr 20 00:00 system.log.7.bz2 Each N.bz2 version is a rotated log. You'll see that system is rotated every night at midnight, but secure.log has been rotated out of turn (right now the campus is suffering a distributed attack on ssh ports, so my log is filling with junk like the following: Apr 27 05:05:16 dbdev2 com.apple.SecurityServer[32]: Failed to authorize right system.login.tty by client /usr/sbin/sshd for authorization created by /usr/sbin/sshd. Apr 27 05:05:16 dbdev2 sshd[88559]: Failed password for invalid user oracle from 72.22.209.43 port 5538 ssh2 Apr 27 05:05:16 dbdev2 sshd[88561]: reverse mapping checking getaddrinfo for biz43.sta.linkcity.org.209.22.72.in-addr.arpa [72.22.209.43] failed - POSSIBLE BREAK-IN ATTEMPT!) Which is less dangerous than it sounds like, since I've got Remote Access tied down pretty securely. We've got a botnet banging on doors all over campus trying common username/password combinations. Rudimentary precautions (no root logins allowed, use good password hygiene) will block this stuff, but you would be astonished at how often even rudimentary precautions aren't taken. However in my case the only problem is that my secure log is filling up rapidly.) -- Bruce Johnson University of Arizona College of Pharmacy Information Technology Group Institutions do not have opinions, merely customs --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed Low End Mac's G3-5 List, a group for those using G3, G4, and G5 desktop Macs - with a particular focus on Power Macs. The list FAQ is at http://lowendmac.com/lists/g-list.shtml and our netiquette guide is at http://www.lowendmac.com/lists/netiquette.shtml To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/g3-5-list?hl=en Low End Mac RSS feed at feed://lowendmac.com/feed.xml -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
