Forum Routine Maintenance 22nd October

[CitroJim]

I shall be carrying out some routine maintenance on the forums in the early hours of Wednesday morning that may result in a short outage.

One of the tasks is to rotate the Apache Web Server logs which necessitates a restart of Apache.

I'm really quite staggered at their growth rate.. Shows how popular the forums are

From now on I'll be declaring each Wednesday morning between about 04:00 and 05:00 UK time a forum maintenance window when full service may be interrupted for short periods...

[Mandrake]

You don't use the log rotate daemon to do it automatically ?

All the Apache installs I've ever administered had their logs rotated automatically, usually weekly.

Set that up once and you won't have to worry about it again...

[CitroJim]

You don't use the log rotate daemon to do it automatically ?

Not yet Simon. I want to do the first one manually just to check it'll be OK before I let the daemon do it all on its own..

The forum sever is running with the full weight of selinux behind it which may complicate... I don't want to take any chances...

Either way, if the task is manual or daemonized the web server still has to restart after log rotates to create and start using the new logs...

[Mandrake]

There's no need for a full restart of Apache. Just send it a SIG USR1 after the logs are rotated which initiates a graceful restart.

Log files are freshly reopened but there is no interruption to currently in progress requests and no downtime.

[CitroJim]

There's no need for a full restart of Apache. Just send it a SIG USR1 after the logs are rotated which initiates a graceful restart.

Log files are freshly reopened but there is no interruption to currently in progress requests and no downtime.

Excellent, that's good to know Simon

Didn't know you were a Unix specialist in addition to all your other skills!

I'll know who to come to when I have issues now

[Mandrake]

Yes, in a previous life Jim... It's been quite a few years though.

[CitroJim]

Yes, in a previous life Jim... It's been quite a few years though.

Id rather be a Unix admin than Windows admin any day Simon. It was how I started in IT back in the days long before Linux when users had dumb terminals for access and Unix really was Unix!!!

Happy days...

All routine maintenance has now been done and the server has been patched with latest updates....

Same again next Wednesday...

[myglaren]

Faster than ever now Jim.

[CitroJim]

That's good to hear Steve

The FCF Apache log grows like topsy. It was over 2GB in size

A few updates were applied to the server and again that'll now be a regular Wednesday job.

It'll be rotated at least weekly from now on under a cron job....