How to manage catalina.out retention on LAG and IDP servers

In the Novell Access Manager Identity Server cluster configuration, under General | Logging, there are settings under File Logging that determine what information is logged to the /var/opt/novell/tomcat5/logs/catalina.out file on the Linux Access Gateway (LAG) and Linux-based Identity Server (IDP). For troubleshooting purposes, it is often necessary to raise the Component File Logger Levels for Application and Liberty (for example) to "debug", which provides more verbose logging to the catalina.out. There are also settings on this page to control Maximum Log Files and File Wrap. These settings, however, do not affect the catalina.out file, they only affect the logs under /var/opt/novell/tomcat5/webapps/nidp(nesp)/WEB-INF/logs.

In order to manage the file wrap and retention settings for the catalina.out file on the LAG and Linux-based IDP servers, it is necessary to modify the file /etc/logrotate.d/novell-tomcat5 on each server. By default, this file has the following content:

/var/opt/novell/tomcat5/logs/*.txt {
        copytruncate
        daily
        rotate 10
        size 50M
        notifempty
        missingok
        compress
}

/var/opt/novell/tomcat5/logs/catalina.out {
        copytruncate
        daily
        rotate 10
        size 50M
        notifempty
        missingok
        compress
}

The file can be modified as desired following the guidelines in the logrotate manual page (view using the command "man logrotate"). The changes will take effect next time logrotate runs. On the LAG appliance, logrotate runs hourly by default, as evidenced by the logrotate script which is present in /etc/cron.hourly. Since the Linux-based IDP server is not an appliance install, the timeframe when logrotate runs will depend on the operating system defaults or the system administrator that installed and configured the server. On SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10, for example, the logrotate script is run in /etc/cron.daily by default.