I’m running a combination of IOG and MRTG to keep track of network traffic and ran into a little bit of MRTG cronjob retardedness. In my haste to get MRTG up and running I forgot that it’s enabled by default on RedHat Enterprise Server even if you haven’t configured it yet. So, when I manually added it to my crontab, it actually ended up running twice in parallel. The result was MRTG eating its logfiles a few times per day so I had no history.
So, for any of you receiving the following errors, double-check your crontab and make sure MRTG is only running once!
Rateup WARNING: /usr/bin/rateup could not read the primary log file for colo1.pixoul.com_2
Rateup WARNING: /usr/bin/rateup Can't remove foo.old updating log file
Rateup WARNING: /usr/bin/rateup Can't rename foo.tmp to foo.log updating log file
Thanks mate, your comment saved the day – indeed it’s in /etc/cron.d/mrtg and runs every 5 mins by default…