I have two FreePBX systems configured at two different locations. While troubleshooting an issue on one of these systems today, I noticed that the log files in /var/log/ are mostly empty. The specific file I am trying to view is “messages,” but it appears that most of the files are empty. Oddly, it does appear to be rotating the files (there are a bunch of versions with dates), but they are empty.
I have found a few with data.
sngupdate
boot.log
anaconda.log
I haven’t check all of the rest, but these at least are all empty.
cron
maillog
messages
secure
spooler
yum.log
I am running FreePBX 14, but upgraded from FreePBX 13 last fall (September 14, according to one of the few longs I have; sngupdate).
The logs on my other system are working as expected. It is also running FreePBX 14, but was upgraded much more recently.
I restarted the service, and suddenly the current versions of many of the log files now have entries. The entries go back to the time of the last server restart, so I suspect they were queued in memory. It also looks like it dropped a few.
I restarted the service, and suddenly the current versions of many of the log files now have entries; it looks like back to the time of the last server restart, although it looks like it did drop some newer messages.
“rsyslogd: imjournal: 2952 messages lost due to rate-limiting”
This got me suspicious that rsyslog wasn’t running automatically.
It looks like the root of the issue was that the rsyslog service was not enabled for some reason. I enabled it, so we’ll see how things go from here, but I suspect this will resolve he issue.