I am trying to look at my Apache2 error logs. The current error log which I can read does not contain the information that I am looking for. However, I see some compressed logs (.gz) on my system that do cover the time period that I am interested in. When I try to read these files it is garbarge, as expected. I tried uncompressing it, but it wants a password, which I do not know. I am running as the root user on my system. I see the decrypt function but there again, I do not know the cryption key. So how do I read this file.
What do you mean “it wants a password”? What wants a password? The compressed files in /var/log are not password protected. A normal user won’t be able to uncompress in the /var/log directory, generally, but it’s not because it’s password protected, but because normal users can’t write arbitrary files to /var/log/apache2 or whatever.
Hi Joe,
I logged in as the root user
I am using filemanager.
I am using the extract command on the file “error.log13.gz” but I get this error message
It looks like it is not working correctly. The first time I tried it it gave me a window to put a password in. I didn’t fill it out so I don’t know if it worked. Second time I tried no window. It just creates an empty directory.
If you really want to see its contents and you are not comfortable in terminal just download it with filemanager, decompress it and open it in a text editor.
Try checking Properties for that file by pressing Alt+Enter while the row for the file is selected using the arrow keys (up/down), or by running file /var/log/apache2/error.log13.gz (or whatever the file name is).
