31

I have a problem, that no logs are written to /var/log.

-rw-r-----  1 syslog adm  6.4M May 21  2014 syslog
-rw-r-----  1 syslog adm  5.7M May 21  2014 daemon.log
-rw-r-----  1 syslog adm  494K May 21  2014 auth.log

But date and time is configured properly

Tue Apr 28 19:38:56 CEST 2015

It seems that I made a dist-upgrade 21 May of 2014. And since then I have no logs written. My system is Ubuntu 14.04 (no GUI). It has been running for 132 days without reboot.

Other log files like MySQL or nginx are up to date. Only system logs don't work.

I hope you can help me.

stil
  • 771

5 Answers5

36

Ok, I found solution somewhere else:

sudo apt-get install --reinstall rsyslog

It seems rsyslog was removed itself at some point.

stil
  • 771
12

have you started/restarted the systemlogs deamon?

    sudo service rsyslog start

or

    sudo service rsyslog restart

this should work. This problem came for me also, i restarted this deamon, now its working fine.

Fuhrmanator
  • 115
  • 10
amit pandya
  • 241
3

Not really directly related to the question, but had similar problem on WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux): system was not writing logs to syslog, rsyslog restart was not completing successfully.

Windows version: Windows 10 Pro 1909
Command: sudo service rsyslog restart

  • Stopping enhanced syslogd rsyslogd [ OK ]
  • Starting enhanced syslogd rsyslogd rsyslogd: set SO_TIMESTAMP failed on '/dev/log': Invalid argument [v8.32.0]
    rsyslogd: imklog: cannot open kernel log (/proc/kmsg): No such file or directory.
    rsyslogd: activation of module imklog failed [v8.32.0 try http://www.rsyslog.com/e/2145 ]

Solution:
From https://askubuntu.com/a/615473/497599

sudo apt-get install --reinstall rsyslog   ()

And start after that! restart is not working. 

sudo service rsyslog restart

Starting enhanced syslogd rsyslogd [ OK ]

https://gist.github.com/0x49D1/596d457921034e9c18e5e1052a4ad515

0x49D1
  • 755
1

Could try this in case something's mis-configured with rsyslog, at least before trying a full reinstall:

sudo dpkg-reconfigure rsyslog
Xen2050
  • 8,943
0

I fixed it by uninstalling rsyslog sudo apt-get purge rsyslog and then reinstalling it sudo apt-get install rsyslog. In my case the permissions and ownership of the files were all correct but the syslog file was empty and all the logs were going into uncategorized.log

Asim
  • 101