How to stop the deluge of entries in /var/log files?

[Craig White]

On Fri, 2010-02-05 at 11:56 -0700, joe at actionline.com wrote:
> Joe last wrote:
> >> Thanks Craig.
> >> Re the permissions item, I neglected to say that the reported files and
> >> directories are already set with the correct permissions, but those
> >> claims of "wrong permissions" keep on coming anyway.
> 
> Then Craig wrote:
> > that defies my understanding of things so I struggle to believe it.
> >
> > what is output of say...
> > ls -l /var/log/lpr
> 
> In this case, the system is generating that particular log with all
> -rw------- permissions, so why cron is generating an "error"
> report to /var/log/lpr saying permissions should be 640 is strange.
----
umm...


> 
> And Craig also wrote:
> > You might want to see what is actually in those files...
> > (/etc/cron.hourly/*, etc.) and potentially edit or remove them as
> > useful. I suspect the ones that are making you crazy are in the
> > cron.hourly
> >
> > Clearly the 'promisc_check.sh' is in the hourly and that would seem to
> > be a safety check from your distro and it is reporting to syslog which
> > actually makes a lot of sense and I would probably just leave it alone
> > (i.e. keep running the 'promiscuity check' every hour
> 
> Thanks. That helped me discover what was going on.
> It just didn't make sense to me that something in /etc/cron.hourly
> would be generating an action every minute.
> 
> And I still don't understand why something in /etc/cron.hourly is running
> every minute rather than once every hour?
> 
> Do most distros have something like this running every minute and adding
> tens of thousands of entries to both syslog and messages plus in several
> other places?  Isn't that a sledgehammer swatting a gnat?  Why is it
> necessary to flood the logs with an entry for every minute that an action
> like this runs?
----
I don't recall seeing this in Fedora, RHEL or CentOS but perhaps it is a
package that you installed that I never install.

Craig


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