I've several web servers that use log4j to generate the logs.
The log file currently appended to is called filename. The older,
non-current logs are called filename.yyyy-mm-dd-hh.
Obviously, rotation takes place once every hour and it's done
automatically by log4j. Old logs are never deleted by log4j, something
else must delete them.
I need to rsync all the filename* files from all web servers
periodically to a "log server", and a safe copy is made to a backup
log
server. Each web server is running an rsync daemon, and a cron job on
the main log server cycles through all web servers periodically.
Logs older than X hours must be deleted from the web servers, but only
provided that a copy already exists on the log server AND another copy
exists on the backup log server (any log file must exist in at least two
places after any given rsync transfer).
Because I want to minimize the number of protocols and applications
involved in the process, I'd like to perform the deletion of old log
files from the web servers using rsync.
Another reason to do that is that I want to handle everything (log
transfer, archival, deletion) via one single cron job on the log server,
instead of various cron jobs on the log server and on each web server,
in order to minimize collisions.
The problem is, the files that must be deleted are on the sender and the
rsync documentation that I'm looking at doesn't seem to provide any clue
as to how to delete files on the sender.
Once some of these conditions are relaxed, the problem appears quite
solvable (e.g., mount the log directories via NFS and then do rsync and
deletion over the NFS mount), but first I'd like to make sure that
there's no way to accomplish everything solely via rsync.
Please enlighten me.
Thanks,
--
Florin Andrei
http://florin.myip.org/
