Need to change permissions on Log files permanently

[jtoninger]

Hi There,

I am trying to set up a zabbix monitoring server, and one of the things I would like to monitor is the logs coming from my FreeNAS/TrueNAS boxes.

I am able to get this working except for the fact that I require the system logs to be set to enable read access to the 'wheel' group. However by default /var/log/messages is set for only the root user to have read or write perms.

Obviously any changes I make to the permissions of the messages logfile are lost after a reboot.

Is there any way to either move the logfile to a directory I can set permissions in persistently, or change the permissions on the logfiles themselves so they apply persistently?

Thanks

 

[Samuel Tai]

You could brute-force it with a post-init task to change the permissions, and also a nightly cron job to do the same. However, why not just forward the logs via syslog to your Zabbix box?

 

[jtoninger]

Zabbix seems not that well set up as a syslog server. I could set up a seperate syslog server on the zabbix server but I have no idea how I would pass that to the Zabbix manager. Based on their documentation its meant to rely on the agent software to pass the logs along, I was actually able to get the agent software installed persistently, so everything aside from reading logfiles. The zabbix agent runs with a Zabbix user account, which is why it cannot read the messages logfile. Switching it to run as root seems like a bad idea so I probably will avoid that.