For those of you who work with Exchange 5.5 on a regular basis and have logging on the Internet Mail Service turned on enough so that you can see what is going on in order to troubleshoot problems when they arise, you probably have run into the situation where the log files get very large.
I haven't yet found a way to have Exchange 5.5 automatically start new logs in a certain time period and if you forget to do it manually every week, the log files can get to be larger than 1 gig. This presents a problem when you have to go into the log to figure out why a message didn't get through or why an attachment didn't get decoded properly.
Notepad can't open text files that large and Wordpad chokes on them as well, even if your system has the resources to open a file that large.
Well thanks to a link on Joel Spolsky's web page I found this sweet little file viewer called V.
It breaks the text file up into small chunks that are instantly accessible on your system. I'm currently viewing a log file that got to the seriously obese size of 1.8GB without problems on a system with only 512MB of memory.
Way cool.
I remember having that problem... though my logs never got THAT large.
To resolve it, I wrote a script to stop the appropriate services via command line, then zipped up the log files, deleted them, then restarted the services. Doing so on a weekly basis seemed to keep things tidy.
Now days, the largest files I end up opening are my Backup Exec log files at ~ 30MB or so.
Good tip though, thanks.
-KHD
Posted by: Kevin H. Devin | Thursday, April 22, 2004 at 12:20 AM