[vox-tech] /var/log/messages Mystery

[Robert G. Scofield]

Because I don't have my computer on for 24 hours a day, I always 
modify /etc/crontab to fire at a time when I will likely be on my computer.  
So in my Debian partition crontab fires during the 8:00 pm hour, and in my 
SuSE partition crontab fires during the 9:00 pm hour.

Since I've had SuSE 9.2, /var/log/messages has not been rotated or deleted 
once.  But in Debian, /var/log/messages has been rotated a couple of times 
since I modified /etc/crontab.  My old SuSE 9.0, and my old Mandrake systems 
also rotated /var/log messages after I changed /etc/crontab.  But SuSE 9.2 is 
not rotating.

According to the SuSE 9.2 Administration Guide "logrotate is controlled 
through cron and is called daily by /etc/cron.daily/."  After reading *man 
logrotate* I put the following into /etc/logrotate.conf:

/var/log/messages {
    rotate 5
    daily
    postrotate
               /sbin/killall -HUP syslogd
    endscript
}

But this has not resulted in /var/log/messages being rotated or deleted.  And 
I notice that in my Debian system there is no reference to /var/log/messages 
in /etc/logrotate.conf.  So I have concluded that /var/log/messages (at least 
in Debian) is controlled by something other than /etc/logrotate.conf.

So can anybody tell me how to get SuSE to rotate or delete /var/log/messages?

I realize that I can always use "bobcron" or "dummycron."  Here's how bobcron 
works:  "rm messages."  But I'd like to get this system to work the way it's 
supposed to.

Thank you.

Bob