Re: rotating log files and adding timestamps to postgres logs

Tom,
Thanks for the speedy reply. This is the official RedHat RHEL-4 package. The full package name is postgresql-server-7.4.17-1.RHEL4.1.x86_64
Your suggested way to do log rotation looks like it will work. Hopefully we'll be able to upgrade to 8.x soon. Log rotation is built-in now, correct?
Log_line_prefix looks like what I need, but most of the documentation I've seen on it is for the 8.x series or working with syslog. I'll try some things out and let you know if I hit any more snags. Thanks again.

-----Original Message-----
From: Tom Lane [mailto:tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us]
Sent: Monday, June 01, 2009 1:59 PM
To: Kenny W Drobnack
Cc: pgsql-admin(at)postgresql(dot)org
Subject: Re: [ADMIN] rotating log files and adding timestamps to postgres logs

Kenny W Drobnack <kenny(dot)w(dot)drobnack(at)jpmchase(dot)com> writes:
> I'm working with an application running on PostgreSQL 7.4.17 on RedHat
> Enterprise Linux.

You mean Red Hat's RHEL-4 packaging, or somebody else's?

> When asked to troubleshoot a problem, I found out
> the script that starts the PostgreSQL server
> (/etc/rc.d/init.d/postgresql) was logging to /dev/null

Yeah, not the best solution :-(. Later versions of that script do better.

> To try to fix this, I changed PGLOG=/dev/null to
> PGLOG="| /usr/sbin/rotatelogs /var/log/pgsql 86400"

That's not going to work in any shell I know about. You'd have to
actually tweak the script a bit, along the lines of

$SU -l postgres -c "$PGENGINE/postmaster -p ${PGPORT} -D '${PGDATA}' ${PGOPTS} &" >> $PGLOG 2>&1 < /dev/null

becomes

$SU -l postgres -c "$PGENGINE/postmaster -p ${PGPORT} -D '${PGDATA}' ${PGOPTS} &" 2>&1 < /dev/null | /usr/sbin/rotatelogs /var/log/pgsql 86400

> On a related note, I'm currently just doing "PGLOG=/var/log/pgsql".
> It is working, but there are no timestamps in the file except for when
> the database was restarted. Any configuration option that can be
> changed to get timestamps in the log file?

Look at log_line_prefix (I think 7.4 had that, though it's a long time
ago...)

regards, tom lane
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