topic Re: Longer messages file retention in ONTAP Discussions

Longer messages file retention

abroadbank — Thu, 05 Jun 2025 06:58:09 GMT

I have a requirement to retain more than the default six weeks worth of the messages file. Does anyone know how to change the default?

As this is a MetroCluster, the snapshot reserve of vol0 tends to fill after one week, so increasing the length of snapshot retention, to access older messages, would not satisfy this problem. Not too keen using the weekly manual copy workaround either.

Re: Longer messages file retention

rmharwood — Thu, 17 Mar 2011 14:37:25 GMT

I don't think changing the log file rotation is possible. You don't need to make it a manual process to copy the messages file every week. Just script it on some client system (either over CIFS or NFS) to copy and rename the file and place it somewhere else, even back onto the filer somewhere. You do have a systems admin capable of writing and scheduling trivial scripts like this, don't you?

Richard

Re: Longer messages file retention

scottgelb — Thu, 17 Mar 2011 14:40:01 GMT

You could redirect syslog. Read through examples for /etc/syslog.conf and you can have an external log server in addition to messages.

Re: Longer messages file retention

abroadbank — Thu, 17 Mar 2011 15:12:35 GMT

Many thanks for both replies, as there seems to be no option to change, I think the better solution would be to update the syslog.conf.