Problems using tmpfs for logs

[hazelday]

What is the story with /var/log being stored on tmpfs? It only seems to take a few infinitely recursive chmod() events (on a filesystem containing backups of parts of a posix filesytem with dangling/unresolvable symlinks) resulting in enough logs to fill up the tmpfs partition.

Anyway, this condition seems to cause some strangeness in the web front-end, like refusal to authenticate, etc.

Why not put httpd logs on disk - say in /raid0/sys/httpd/? Failing that, what about running the apache log through a rotating logger that's set to not hold more than 2mb or so of logs?

-Peter

[hazelday]

Additional failure modes in this case:

1) Can't mount nfs - all mounts rejected
2) can't change, add, or delete nfs permissions
3) Can't do much of anything else
4) Admin user login doesn't seem to expire
5) Most web pages load, but almost none do anything.

This seems wrong. Tmpfs is not made for this sort of use. It's for small, transient files, and its memory could be better used for buffer cache on a NAS box. I notice that /tmpfs/var/logs symlinks the 3 httpd logs to /dev/null. Why is there a similar but different set of logs under /tmpfs/var/log that contain files that can fill up over time?

-Peter