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Syslog, auth.log, kern.log and messages log files are not updated anymore after upgrading to Debian Wheezy (Debian Squeeze was previously running).

How could I fix it?

Thierry M.S.
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2 Answers2

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I figured the exact issue has been encountered by other Debian users (http://forums.debian.net/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=104049).

To restore logging, one just needs to reinstall a syslog daemon (similar to the one that had been removed during upgrade), for example:

apt-get install inetutils-syslogd

Josip Rodin
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Thierry M.S.
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7

Came here because one of our customers' servers was upgraded from Debian Etch (4) to squeeze (6), to wheezy (7) and finally to Jessie (8) last week and /var/log/syslog had no activity since then.

It turns out that back in Debian 5, sysklogd was replaced with rsyslog. This wasn't updated on the specific system, though. When backwards compatibility happened to stop being maintained with the upgrade to Debian 7, it broke.

The solution is simply to install the rsyslog package as mentioned in http://jonsimpson.co.uk/log/2014/syslogd-updated-debian and syslog is up and running again.

apt-get install rsyslog
Josip Rodin
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Martin Seitl
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