FreeRadius log rotation

Once I installed FreeRadius from the source code, so I needed to make a log rotation script, since the log file sometimes grew to large sizes, for example, during technical work or development, a lot of debugging information could be written, during standard work, almost no logs were written.

The installation files contain an example of log rotation configuration:

cp /opt/freeradius-server-3.0.23/scripts/logrotate/freeradius /etc/logrotate.d/

/var/log/radius/radius.log {
        # common options
        daily
        rotate 14
        missingok
        compress
        delaycompress
        notifempty

        copytruncate
        su radiusd radiusd
}

However, in my case the radius.log file is in a different location and with different permissions, so I created my own file /etc/logrotate.d/freeradius:

/usr/local/freeradius/var/log/radius/radius.log {
        monthly
        rotate 3
        missingok
        compress
        delaycompress
        notifempty

        copytruncate
        su freerad freerad
}

With the “copytruncate” parameter, the radius.log file is copied to radius.log.1, and then radius.log is cleared to zero size, instead of being renamed to radius.log.1 and creating radius.log, so that the FreeRadius server does not have to be restarted.

Let’s test the script to make sure that there is no “Permission denied” error, for example, as in my case, only the root user had rights to the directory with logs:

logrotate -d /etc/logrotate.d/freeradius

chmod 777 /usr/local/freeradius/var/log/radius/

If everything is ok, then we will force the rotation:

logrotate -f /etc/logrotate.d/freeradius

The status can be viewed in the file /var/lib/logrotate/status

See also my articles:
ABillS. Installing Freeradius
Configuring logrotate to rotate logs