I've been working on this over the holiday break, and I have something reasonable that so far is working ok.

Overall, the goal is to capture daily logs from both the main and various backup NAS, and consolidate those in a Logs share on the main NAS. The overall organization is to create a $(hostname) folder for each NAS in the share. Within that there is a folder for each year (e.g., 2021), and each month (2021-01, 2021-02, etc). When run on the main NAS, the script will write the logs directly to the consolidated log share. On the backup NAS, it writes the logs to a local share (LocalLogs), and then rsyncs that to the main NAS. The idea there is to allow me to back up the consolidated log share w/o having any contention (due to the backup jobs running at the same time as the script).

The script applies retention of 7 days to LocalLogs, but does not apply retention to the consolidated log. The idea there is that I don't want to have to manually log into the backup NAS regularly to clean LocalLogs (they are on a power schedule, so that is inconvenient). But it is ok for me to manually prune the consolidated logs. I might do something along the lines of the snapshot thinning used in SMART snaphots later on - not sure.

The system log naming convention is a bit different from the normal ReadyNAS names - I changed it in order to make it sort better (putting the HDSentinel log, the SMART log, and the system log for a given date together).

I designed the script to run both on my legacy 4.1.x NAS and OS-6 - and deliberately used old-school syntax to limit any compatibility issues with the older linux on 4.1.x. Probably over-did that. OS-6 is detected by looking for rnutil. Main vs Backup is detected by looking at the IP address (which is 10.0.0.15 on my main NAS). All my OS-6 NAS have a data volume (even the one running jbod FlexRaid), and of course all legacy NAS have a C volume. So I use those volume names.

The script itself is

#!/bin/sh
#
# set up some useful variables
#
MainNasIP=10.0.0.15
NasIP=`exec hostname -i | awk -F " " '{print $NF}'`
RemoteShareName=Logs
test "$MainNasIP" != "$NasIP" \
   && { ShareName=LocalLogs; \
      Retention=7; } \
   || ShareName=Logs; \
test -e /usr/bin/rnutil && LogShare=/data/$ShareName || LogShare=/c/$ShareName
LogFolder=$LogShare/$(hostname)
HDSentinel=/apps/HDSentinel/HDSentinel
timestamp="$(date +%Y%m%d_%H%M%S)"
RsyncFilter="--include=$(date +%Y)/ --include=$(date +%Y-%m)/*** --exclude=*";
test -e /usr/bin/rnutil && RshParm=-rsh=rsh
#
# make output folder if not there
#
test -d $LogFolder || mkdir $LogFolder
#
# Save Logs in /Logs/hostname/year/year-month
# build the longer folder name in two steps, so mkdir works
#
LogFolder=$LogFolder/$(date +%Y);
test -d $LogFolder || mkdir $LogFolder;
LogFolder=$LogFolder/$(date +%Y-%m);
test -d $LogFolder || mkdir $LogFolder;
#
# get system logs with rnutil on OS-6, otherwise zip /var/logs
# rnutil will create an empty file named "1" in its folder; which is harmless. But let's delete it anyway
# get smartctl data (somewhat different command for OS-6 than OS-4)
#
test -e /usr/bin/rnutil \
   && { rnutil create_system_log -o $LogFolder/$(hostname)-$timestamp-System.zip;\
      rm ./1;\
      for i in a b c d e f g h i j k l m n; do smartctl -a -x -l defects /dev/sd${i} | egrep -v "local build|No such device|smartmontools"; done >>$LogFolder/$(hostname)-$timestamp-Smart.log; }\
   || { /apps/Scripts/diag >/tmp/diagnostics.log;\
      /apps/Scripts/90_CreateLogs;\
      zip -r -j $LogFolder/$(hostname)-$timestamp-System.zip /ramfs/log_zip/*;\
      test -d /ramfs/log_zip && rm -rf /ramfs/log_zip;\
      test -e /tmp/diagnostics.log && rm /tmp/diagnostics.log;\
      for i in a b c d e f g h i j k l m n; do smartctl -a -x /dev/hd${i} | egrep -v "local build|No such device|smartmontools"; done >>/$LogFolder/$(hostname)-$timestamp-Smart.log; }
#
# log HDsentinel info if present
#
test -e $HDSentinel && $HDSentinel -r $LogFolder/$(hostname)-$timestamp-HDSentinel
#
# Apply retention limits if variable set
#
test "$Retention" != "" && find $LogShare/$(hostname)/* -mtime +$Retention -exec rm {} \;
test "$Retention" != "" && find $LogShare/$(hostname) -type d -empty -delete
#
# rsync logs to the main NAS if this is a backup NAS
# this requires that rsync be enabled as read-write on the destination share.
# retention is not being applied to the destination share
#
test "$MainNasIP" != "$NasIP" && rsync $RshParm -amv $RsyncFilter $LogShare/$(hostname)/* $MainNasIP::$RemoteShareName/$(hostname)
exit 0

On OS-6 I chose to run this as a service, and not in a cron job. To do this, you need to put a service and a timer specification into /var/systemd/system. The files I am using are below.

update_logs.service:

[Unit]
Description=Capture Logs Service
After=network-online.target multi-user.target

[Service]
Type=oneshot
RemainAfterExit=no
ExecStart=/apps/Scripts/update_logs

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

update_logs.timer:

[Unit]
Description=Capture Logs Service

[Timer]
OnCalendar=*-*-* 00:04:00
Persistent=true
Unit=update_logs.service

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

The services are set up by entering

systemctl enable update_logs
systemctl start update_logs
systemctl enable update_logs.timer
systemctl start update_logs.timer

The timer setting for Persistent is supposed to detect that the service wasn't run because the NAS was off, and run it at the next boot when that is detected. I haven't tested that.

Note that the exit 0 at the end of the script is intentional. If the final test is false, then the script returns an error status. Also, if the rsync fails because the main NAS is down, then the script would also return an error. There are apparently scenarios when systemd will stop running services that repeatedly fail. I don't know for sure if that can happen with a one-shot service, but it seemed best to avoid it.

I'll describe how I am building the system log for the legacy NAS in the next post.

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