In order to troubleshoot the error and investigating the issues, it is very important to know the location of logs files on the server. These logs from the server log files help us to understand the nature of the problem. So, we can say that the log files play an important role in the error troubleshooting process. There are so many control panels are available today. For each control panel, the log files and their locations are different. Here, we are discussing with the DirectAdmin control panel. DirectAdmin is web hosting control panel software, similar to cPanel, which allow us to manage websites and so many hosting options using a graphical, web-based interface. DirectAdmin automates tasks so that web servers can be easily shared and give web site owners a way to quickly set-up and manage websites. Here are some important and commonly using log files for Linux server which has DirectAdmin as a control panel.
1) Following are the Default DirectAdmin log files. These log files information shows system related logs location, secure login logs, audit logs etc.
# /var/log/directadmin/error.log
# /var/log/directadmin/errortaskq.log
# /var/log/directadmin/system.log
# /var/log/directadmin/security.log
2) Apache is the most popular web server. By using these apache logs, we can easily find out the problems with apache server, syntax related errors and who is accessing what pages through the access log files etc. Though the individual site has its own traffic log file located under the different path. But general troubleshooting on apache can be done using the two log files ie. error_log and access_log. All the apache log file locations are listed below.
# /var/log/httpd/error_log
# /var/log/httpd/access_log
# /var/log/httpd/suexec_log
# /var/log/httpd/fpexec_log
# /var/log/httpd/domains/domain.com.error.log
# /var/log/httpd/domains/domain.com.log
# /var/log/messages (generic errors)
3) ProFTPD provides several different and flexing logging mechanisms. The three main log files of FTP are ProFTP Access Logs, ProFTP Auth Logs, PureFTPd Logs.
#/var/log/proftpd/access.log
#/var/log/proftpd/auth.log
#/var/log/messages (generic errors)
The PureFTPd log file is as follows.
# /var/log/pureftpd.log
4) Exim is Mail transfer agent and it has three primary log file i.e exim_mainlog, exim_rejectlog and exim_paniclog. The main log file shows SMTP transfer logs where you can assess if the email was successfully delivered or not. Reject log will show incoming emails rejection and the panic log will show logs related to exim server if failed.
# /var/log/exim/mainlog
# /var/log/exim/paniclog
# /var/log/exim/rejectlog
# /var/log/exim/processlog
5) Dovecot and vm-pop3d logs are as follows.
# /var/log/maillog
# /var/log/messages
6) Next, we are going to discuss Mysql server logs. Every piece of information about mysql startup, shutdown or database errors are stored in a single file. The path of the file can be changed as per the system configurations. You can monitor the log file with tail command and see mysql related activities. More important it can show which database tables are corrupted and needs repairing.
# /var/lib/mysql/{SERVER_NAME}.err
If MySQL slow query log is enabled in your my.cnf. Then the file location will be:
# /var/log/slowqueries
7) You can find the cron job logs from the below log file location.
# /var/log/cron
8) Named (Bind) Logs are included in the generic log location.
# /var/log/messages
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