newsyslog – telling it not to compress, for anything

In this post, I’m going to show you how I told FreeBSD’s newsyslog to ignore any compression directives and just rotate the file. I will also speculate about some historical items which may be widely incorrect. If you wish to correct any inaccuracies, I will update them here. In this post: FreeBSD 15 wild speculation as to how logging, newsyslog, and compression evovled many paragraphs which aren’t related, but you may find interesting, so skip to the end if in a hurry Way back when… Logging is good. Log files fill up. Disk space was expensive. Let’s rotate them away. And newsyslog was born. I know how we can save more disk space! Compress the rotated files. Nobody writes to them. We can save space! Let’s add this new algorithm for compression, it’ll be faster and save even more space! I enjoy how new features come in to meet preferences and optimizations. This post talks about one such change. Then ZFS came along One of the fantastic ZFS features is filesystem compression. With…