Where did "Write logs via program" go?

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#1 Sat, 12/10/2011 - 17:18
otis

Where did "Write logs via program" go?

I am moving a server on which I have virtualmin pro installed. All the virtual servers have "Write logs via program" set to "yes" in Server Configuration | Website Options.

I have installed virtualmin pro on the new box, but the "Write logs via program" option does not appear in Server Configuration | Website Options on the new installation. Where has this gone?

If that option has been eliminated in new installations, I'm concerned that when I backup virtual servers on the old box and restore them on the new box this difference is going to cause trouble. Will it?

Sun, 12/11/2011 - 13:37
andreychek

Howdy,

That option is no longer necessary on on new installs due to an improved way that logs are handled.

However, old Virtual Servers configured to use that should continue to work just fine.

-Eric

Mon, 11/24/2014 - 19:11 (Reply to #2)
ReArmedHalo

Hi Eric,

I know this thread is two years old, but was hoping you might be able to explain how they were handled before and the new way? I am moving my Apache logs to the users home directory and stumbled across this thread (https://www.virtualmin.com/node/17405) and then while attempting to look for the "Write logs via program" found this thread.

Thanks, -Dustin

Mon, 11/24/2014 - 23:08 (Reply to #3)
andreychek

Howdy,

Well, I really wouldn't recommend that if possible... in the user's homedir, if the user deletes the "logs" directory, it will cause Apache to not start.

To counter that, in the past Virtualmin had used a special program for interacting with Apache to write the logs to disk (called writelogs), which handled the missing directory better.

However, it requires two processes per domain to do that. As systems held more domains, we were occasionally seeing reliability issues due to the large number of processes, but it was also eating up RAM.

We eventually came up with the current method, which we feel is much improved. The user still has access to their logs in $HOME/logs/ as a symlink, and in the Virtualmin GUI, but they don't have enough rights to break anything :-)

The writelogs was initially deprecated, but I believe it was later removed entirely.

-Eric

Mon, 11/24/2014 - 23:21 (Reply to #4)
ReArmedHalo

Hi,

I see... Thank you Eric for the explanation :)

My issue is the /var/log/virtualmin directory isn't something that sits on a central file server (GlusterFS in my case) so logs would be different across each system. If I made the /var/log/virtualmin directory be on the file server, can you see any issues? Virtualmin itself only runs on one server so I wouldn't have multiple Virtualmin systems writing to it at all.

Thanks, Dustin

Tue, 11/25/2014 - 09:43 (Reply to #5)
andreychek

Howdy,

Well, it's hard to say for certain without knowing your exact setup... but there shouldn't be anything wrong with making /var/log/virtualmin on a separate filesystem. If you wish to put that on your server, I believe that will be fine.

-Eric

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